Game Over

Ah well.

It's my own fault really. I'd got the game fairly well advanced (though it still looks much the same - there was a status line with HPs and XPs and Gold and messages, but otherwise) - I had the monster moving and end game stuff left to do.

And I've killed it. Not quite sure how. Mucking around with bitbucket and branches I think, but suddenly pow - it had gone from the repository and the hard disk version, and there appears to be no way back - tried undelete, no luck so far.

And, of course, I hadn't done a boring old zip type back up.

Mea culpa.

Some working code

Yes, actually some code that vaguely works. I've got the display and map creation working quite nicely. The game works a bit like "Sword of Fargoal" in that it normally doesn't look like this, it opens up as you work your way through the game. The game is in many ways a simplified version of Sword of Fargoal.

The two blank lines at the top are for prompts. If I have the time I may change this so its a scrolling around a central point kind of game (e.g. the player does not move on the screen, everything else moves round him or her).

The two numbers are the Frames/Second and the number of rooms.

This is written using a tool called AppGameKit, which is quite an old fashioned BASIC language (appropriately) but it is cross device portable - this is a Windows version but I could port it to work on OSX, iOS and Android. Could this be the next Flappy Bird ? (No).

Anyone know .....

What a "nuibus" is ?

This is one of the six types of monster in the dungeon. The others are obvious or common 'monster names' but this one has beaten me.

It sounds like some sort of connection system Apple used for a few weeks to con people into lock ins, and then got abandoned.

Google returns precisely nothing at all ......

It's not that it actually matters or anything but I was scrounging tiles from a free set for RPGs, and I have no idea what to use.

In the end, I just used a Skeleton.

Reverse Engineered

The Dungeon program has now been reverse engineered, so I know how it works and what everything does (much simpler than Apshai and Morloc for many reasons)

There is now a repository which allows you to see the code, play the original and so on.

Retrochallenge week .....

Okay, so seven or eight days isn't a lot of time to take apart Apshai or Morloc.

So instead, I'm going to do their predecessor. Called, creatively "Dungeon" it is one of the first Dungeon Crawlers for home computers (as opposed to University computers)

It was actually published in "Cursor" Magazine. This is a predecessor of things like "Your Sinclair" where they used to put games on cover tapes (and later disks) and the magazines which used to print games listings except that most of the content was on the cassette itself.

One completely insane entertaining website I subscribe to is http://crpgaddict.blogspot.co.uk/. This chap is attempting to play every single CRPG ever (I suspect he will have to stop when the PSX era kicks in as it would be impossible to keep ahead), which includes games like Apshai and of course Dungeon.

He has finished it, and he writes all about it here. One question he asks is "I don't know if there's a way to win the game" and the answer to this is, yes, it is possible to win, by collecting all the gold.

There are a couple of ... action .... videos on YouTube which give you some feel of the game play. I would skip the first minute or so, as it takes about a minute to set the maze up. See here for example.