Making A Text Dungeon Crawler On the Commodore 64: Part 5 Catching Up

So, I took a couple days off from my Commodore 64 BASIC dungeon crawl to take breather from the project, a little breather, and to work out how I was going to handle the movement and other factors that are needed to make a dungeon crawl.

In my attempt to "save memory" I decided to use a one dimensional array to store my room data and, even worse, I stored strings instead of integers in my array. Something like:

10 DIM RM$(100)

Making A Text Dungeon Crawler On the Commodore 64: Part 4 A Brief Interlude

Welcome to video four in the series. This is getting to be an enjoyable series for me!

As I get deeper into this project I wanted to take a few moments and fix a variable that I may have problems with in the future. This project is reminding me of the many pitfalls I had on my BASIC game projects when I was in high school. The most noticable to me is the fact that I didn't plan out the projects that well. So, as a result, I'd either work my self into a corner and have to start the project over and better planned or I'd have to implement a feature poorly because I didn't think it out well enough. There were also times I'd get so fed up with a project I'd abandon it. I find that is the case here.

Making A Text Dungeon Crawler On the Commodore 64: Part 3 Character Creation And Bug Hunts

Ah, the third video in a series of videos where I uses the Commodore 64 to create a simple text dungeon crawl. Of course I'm using C64 BASIC.  This video is a bit long and I think it clocks in at over 30 minutes but that was not on purpose.

When I'm doing these videos I'm programming something off the top of my head. This is not the proper way to do things as you would usually do a lot of planning. This was, however, how I used to do projects, well most projects, back when I was in high school. It was any wonder I got any of them completed.

Making A Text Dungeon Crawler On the Commodore 64: Part 2 We Have A Title Screen

Welcome back, this is the second in a series of videos where I program the commodore 64.  I am currently programming a game.  The game is a text based dungeon diving adventure game.

In this video I went ahead and implemented my rudimentary state machine for the game.  The first state is the title screen.  So I've gone ahead and implemented the title screen.  The game is working pretty well right now.

Making A Text Dungeon Crawler On the Commodore 64: Part 1 Initialize the Game

OK so I decided to start programming a Commodore 64 video game. In my last programming video I'd made a Christmas candle it was written in Commodore 64 BASIC.  I enjoyed this process very much and the urge to do another project has started to tempt me.  I had been watching various you two videos of other people's programming projects and several of them had done a simple dungeon crawl.  So I figured that should be my next project.

Bring Back the Arcades of Yore!

Where all the cool kids hung out.

I miss the video game arcades of the early 80s. More importantly I feel sorry for people who were PacMan skillz. Odds are they'd hand your ass to you with their better than uber PacMan skillz.
born too late to experience such places. Arcades were great. They were the social hang outs for us nerds and introverts. Instead of being a jocular football player we could be "cyber" athletes of a sort. Of course there were a handful of nerd girls who'd hang out at the arcades so if you weren't too shy you might be able to woo them with your awesome

Arcades were an awesome experience. They were usually under lit in order to make the games and artwork stand out. The sounds was a cacophony of beeps, bloops and the battling music of attract screens. The only modern equivalent I can give is walking in to a Las Vegas casino and listening to the siren songs of the electronic gambling machines. A lot of times there was the steady flow of Top 40 music coming from speakers embedded in the ceilings of these places. You might just make out the tunes of a favorite song above the din of the machines.

Disney Confirms "Other" Star Wars Films!

A movie I may have.

Okay, if you are a fan of Star Wars (like I am) then you will be interested to know that Disney and Lucasfilms has officially confirmed that there will be stand alone films that are not part of the new Trilogy coming soon.  What does this mean?

Okay, we all know that Episode VII is coming in 2015 with Episodes VIII and IX coming shortly after that. This will, most likely, follow the family Skywalker the same as Episodes I through VI. That much has been (pretty much) established though no real plot details of the new trilogy have been revealed..

I Played Risk And I Lost...But I Loved It!

I didn't win.

Last Sunday I pulled a six hour game of Risk with some friends. Actually it was Lord of the Rings Risk but that's not important. It marked the first time in a very long time that I actually got to sit down and play the game. I had forgotten how much I enjoyed it. I'd like to do it more often.

One of the things that I noticed was how frustrating it gets when you are trying to take over a country just to gain a Risk card. On many occasion you'd have a stack of five armies  and were going against a single army. You could roll three sixes but it seemed like the defender was always rolling sixes too. In Risk the tie goes to the defender. It's maddening to have a large stack of armies whittled down to a couple due to (apparently) bad dice rolls. You'd swear those things were rigged.

The game overall was fun and I really enjoyed myself. Next time I intend to win and not come in second place.