How I made a game played in Notepad

I gotta say, I was expecting a form of interactive fiction that makes you go to certain parts of the text using "find" and maybe type custom text here and there for personalization or keeping state, and/or something like the vim tutorial which takes place entirely in standard vim and lets you practice cursor movements etc...

Still neat, with the animations it's more like an ascii art terminal or text mode game

> With this feature unlocked, I basically created an ASCII based renderer.

Haha this is great, having an external program that watches a text file for changes and then writes to it, and forcing a text editor to not complain in order to make it merely an "ASCII based renderer" is a neat concept.

Also very interesting that the interaction with the game involves a sort of awkward GUI where you have to bring the cursor to the right spot and then type an 'x' in order to click.

This is a stellar example of a GAAUI. Graphical ASCII Art User Interface.

I've seen enough. Get the stake and the fire.

This reminds me of a time at a games company one of the tasks we had to do was to fake the game running in a browser for a demo (this was around 2008) easy trick as you just had to change the render handle to any window handle and you were done.

In fact, initially that's what I thought this article was going to be about.

Wish I hadn't dismissed it as too easy and joined the team, as the accolades and attention they got for demoing the game 'running' in Notepad made me quite jealous, especially knowing how technically trivial it was!

The lesson here, I think, is that there is nearly always something compelling about recontextualising something mundane that people are familiar with into something dynamic and unexpected.

> An experienced Javascript programmer should have no trouble reading and understanding the general idea of C code.

Sigh, how I wish that were generally true.