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A 4k-Room Text Adventure Written by One Human in QBasic No AI

the-ventureweaver.itch.io

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Re: A 4k-Room Text Adventure Written by One Human in QBasic No AI

#11

Post by arscan »

The first program I ever wrote was a choose your own adventure, I think written on my family’s IBM PC jr in Basic. It’s pretty amazing how far a kid can get with GOTO statements and a lot of patience. But for some reason I couldn’t (or didn’t know how to) save it, so I’d work on it all day, have my sister and mom play it, and then shut off the computer thus losing my days work.

Or at least, that’s how I remember it. It’s been a good 40 years though and I wouldn’t be surprised if reality was quite a bit different.

Edit: I’ve been thinking about this a bit and honestly my motivation for writing software hasn’t really changed. The users, sure, but not the motivation. It’s just thrilling to share things I built with other people.

Re: A 4k-Room Text Adventure Written by One Human in QBasic No AI

#14

Post by citizenkeen »

ATiredGoat wrote: post #2

In an age where games are written by algorithms and dialogue is generated by AI, The Labyrinth of Time’s Edge stands apart. It’s the first open world "like" modern text adventure written entirely by a single human being, no AI, no procedural generation, no corporate fingerprints. Just words, code, and imagination. Built in pure QBasic, The Labyrinth of Time’s Edge now spans over 3,900 handcrafted rooms which will be…

> It’s the first open world "like" modern text adventure written entirely by a single human being

This rings false

Re: A 4k-Room Text Adventure Written by One Human in QBasic No AI

#15

Post by mromanuk »

arscan wrote: post #11

The first program I ever wrote was a choose your own adventure, I think written on my family’s IBM PC jr in Basic. It’s pretty amazing how far a kid can get with GOTO statements and a lot of patience. But for some reason I couldn’t (or didn’t know how to) save it, so I’d work on it all day, have my sister and mom play it, and then shut off the computer thus losing my days work. Or at least, that’s how I remember it.…

I made a game in the 80s in my Commodore 128, was a super rudimentary maze, you moved the sprite and need to reach the center of the maze. That was it. It was very basic, but I was proud and showed it to some folks. I'd love to see the code and game now.

Re: A 4k-Room Text Adventure Written by One Human in QBasic No AI

#19

Post by bdcravens »

helpfulclippy wrote: post #16

I’m surprised to see a QBasic game with 1GHz CPU and 512MB RAM required! Is that because the game needs it, or because that’s what it takes to even run a modern OS with dosbox or something?

The latter I assume. The game does load the text file into memory, so the old 640kb machines would probably struggle, but otherwise, it looks like it should run well enough on a 386 (or even a 286, where I wrote my first QBasic scripts, though they were nowhere nearly as polished)

Re: A 4k-Room Text Adventure Written by One Human in QBasic No AI

#20

Post by antod »

gerdesj wrote: post #10

Give your preferred AI agent internet search powers and look up how Elite managed to cram rather a lot of game into a nominal 64KB on a C64 or 32KB on a BBC model B. That's a first person 3D space craft simulation with a very impressive Heads Up Display with vector graphics (unfilled on BBC and C64, filled on PC). It is also a commodity trading game to improve your spaceship etc and with a massive amount of variety i…

It sure was. Although my favourite Elite port was the Amiga one.

Another one I was amazed by was Tomahawk on the Spectrum. A wireframe helicopter gunship flight sim with live ground campaign happening around you in 48k.

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