The game I played previous to DROD that was closest to it was called "
Robots"
, if I remember right. It was on the Kaypro II. My first game programming was changing Robots so it would display some better ASCII characters to represent game objects. The walls were pound signs and I changed them to be this solid-looking character ( chr$(127) ) I found in the ASCII set that looked more wallish.
I actually made a lot of games with the same stop-and-go behavior as Robots because it was easier to make decent games with MBasic on the Kaypro. To draw a room was something like this (from memories twenty years ago):
10 dim a$(10)
20 a$(1) = "#####"
30 a$(2) = "# #"
40 a$(3) = "# #"
50 a$(4) = "# #"
60 a$(5) = "#####"
100 print chr$(26)
120 for i = 1 to 5
130 print a$(i)
140 next i
If I wanted to get some input, I had two choices:
150 command$ = input$(1)
...which waited for me to press one key and then returned it. Or...
150 command$ = inkey$()
...which returned immediately with the key I was currently pressing or an empty string if no key was pressed. Then in response to the key, I'd update the text arrays representing the room and write a "
goto 100"
to redraw. If I wanted an arcade-style game where everything updated without waiting, then I'd use inkey$(). The trouble was that with an interpreted language printing characters on the screen was terribly terribly slow, and also you saw the cursor dancing all over while it updated. So I had a preference for input$(1) and made a lot of games based on it. If I had started with a Commodore 64 or something more oriented towards games and graphics, then I might have made different programming choices.
One game I saw that seemed amazing to me was Adventure on the Atari 2600. The thing I liked was that the rooms had different kinds of things in them. You'd walk one direction and there'd be a monster you had to fight and then explore another direction and there'd be a big maze. I liked how it was mini-games inside of one game, and the exploration aspect blew me away. In my head, that game world stretched on forever, way beyond what one of those tiny cartridges could hold. I made 3 or 4 input$(1) versions of Adventure, and since they used stop-and-go mechanics they were a lot different--more DROD-like.
-Erik
____________________________
The Godkiller - Chapter 1 available now on Steam. It's a DROD-like puzzle adventure game.
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[Last edited by ErikH2000 at 02-11-2006 02:02 AM]
Disclaimer: I'm Welsh, left-handed, and stupid. 
