G'day, i'm Richard but my Matrix name is Palocles. I'll take this opportunity to give a proper run down of what i'm doing here as the blog description only allows 500 charcters, which is woefully insufficient.
A long time ago in a city not too far from here i was in highschool and decided to take Computer Studies as a subject. This helped me avoid sports but did nothing to alleviate my geekish status. Said status being further enhanced by an interest in such things as Fighting Fantasy books and RPGs.
At some point in that, my last year of highschool, i decided to convert the FF gamebook Deathtrap Dungeon into a computer game. The way Basic work(ed/s) led me to believe it would be a simple enough matter and the content could remain virtually unchanged.
I successfully created the code to name a character and generate their stats: Skill, Stamina and Luck. With a checky little cheat which made the player absurdly talented if they named themselves "Bobby the Cat", in honour of my cat, Bobby.
Unfortunately the project got derailed when i began to transcribe the fluffy background material, otherwise known as the Coercive Beginning, into the program as this took so much time i never got around to writing any more actual game code. D'oh.
Fast forward nearly 20 years and here i am again. About to begin a Programming Diploma and suddenly inspired to repeat my original attempt to convert Deathtrap Dungeon. I wont be learning Basic on the Diploma, there are much more powerful languages available but out of a sense of nostalgia i intend to use Basic yet again.
A quick Google search reveals that justBASIC is free and has wiki and forum support. A quick tinker around with the code reveals i remember fuck all of the language and justBASIC differs slightly to what i remember. Nevermind, it comes with Help files and Tuts. Which Vista doesn't support...
So my start was off to a bit of rocking and/or shaking. A couple of forum posts later and with thanks to Rod i had got the Help files working! First obstactle overcome. Next obstacle, crap loads of coding...
My next post will describe the progress i have made thus far and may also include some discussion on the limitations of gamebooks and whether they should be adhered too for this project and the limitations of coding in Basic.
Also thanks to Murray of the very funny Turn to 400 blog and Dan of the prolific Fighting Dantasy blog, both here on Blogspot, for inspiring me to actually make this blog of my efforts.
A long time ago in a city not too far from here i was in highschool and decided to take Computer Studies as a subject. This helped me avoid sports but did nothing to alleviate my geekish status. Said status being further enhanced by an interest in such things as Fighting Fantasy books and RPGs.
At some point in that, my last year of highschool, i decided to convert the FF gamebook Deathtrap Dungeon into a computer game. The way Basic work(ed/s) led me to believe it would be a simple enough matter and the content could remain virtually unchanged.
I successfully created the code to name a character and generate their stats: Skill, Stamina and Luck. With a checky little cheat which made the player absurdly talented if they named themselves "Bobby the Cat", in honour of my cat, Bobby.
Unfortunately the project got derailed when i began to transcribe the fluffy background material, otherwise known as the Coercive Beginning, into the program as this took so much time i never got around to writing any more actual game code. D'oh.
Fast forward nearly 20 years and here i am again. About to begin a Programming Diploma and suddenly inspired to repeat my original attempt to convert Deathtrap Dungeon. I wont be learning Basic on the Diploma, there are much more powerful languages available but out of a sense of nostalgia i intend to use Basic yet again.
A quick Google search reveals that justBASIC is free and has wiki and forum support. A quick tinker around with the code reveals i remember fuck all of the language and justBASIC differs slightly to what i remember. Nevermind, it comes with Help files and Tuts. Which Vista doesn't support...
So my start was off to a bit of rocking and/or shaking. A couple of forum posts later and with thanks to Rod i had got the Help files working! First obstactle overcome. Next obstacle, crap loads of coding...
My next post will describe the progress i have made thus far and may also include some discussion on the limitations of gamebooks and whether they should be adhered too for this project and the limitations of coding in Basic.
Also thanks to Murray of the very funny Turn to 400 blog and Dan of the prolific Fighting Dantasy blog, both here on Blogspot, for inspiring me to actually make this blog of my efforts.
good luck homie!
ReplyDeletei used BASIC a little bit back in the day but I never really got beyond:
10 PRINT "Murray is a rad dude!!!!"
20 GOTO 10
Thanks Murray. I hope you'll subscribe so i can get your ideas on each stage i go through in this effort.
ReplyDeleteYou might want to try code more like this:
10 x = 1
20 x = x + 1
30 print "Murray is a rad dude!!!!"
40 if x = 1000 then end
50 goto 20
That way your program will eventually come to an end. But you can always make it got to a million.