Let's Play Ultima 1! Part 1: Getting Started

Never finished it though I've played it many times.

Hello and welcome. I've finally decided to play through Ultima 1 from beginning to end. I've decided that I will not use a walk through or any other hints or cheats found on the web. I will try to use my wits and the provided manual to figure this stuff out. I'm playing the DOS version which I bought over on Good Old Games.

A little history. The first time I played Ultima 1 was back in the mid 80s. I had several friends who played it and a technique was to grill each other at school the day after an intense night of gaming. We'd let each other know any secrets we found or how to solve a quest if it proved to hard to figure out by our selves. Those were fun days of gaming.

One may wonder why I'm starting on Ultima 1 instead of Akalabeth  (or Ultima 0). A number of years ago I played Akalabeth on an Apple II emulator and recorded the process to be uploaded to YouTube.

After going through that I found it hard to actually want to play the game again. I might give it a go if/after I finish Ultima 1. There is now a C64 version of it out now and I'm thinking about giving that a go. We'll have to see.

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.

Game Update 4: A New Mapping Solution?

Mappy Fail?

I have spent many long hours staring at the code I've written for my Ultima Style cRPG. As I mentioned back in my last up date I'd run into a few snags. One was a crashing problem where I was trying to de-allocate memory for an object I created twice. That fix came pretty quickly once I looked at what I was doing.  The next problem has not been so easy to fix.

The problem I'm having (and I'll see if I can explain it) is I have a tile based map (using Mappy) and I have a little animated guy running around the map. Now, every time the little guy moves he moves an arbitrary amount of pixels. This represents his speed and needs to remain constant through out the game. Since the map is bigger than the window that contains it the map needs to scroll. The part of the map that is shown while scrolling is represented by a rectangle and it has a coordinate system that is an offset from the coordinates of the little guy.  The problem is when I'm on the upper and left side of the map the guy moves the correct amount of pixels and the offset moves the correct amount of pixels. But when the little guy hits a certain point going left or going down he begins to double the amount of pixels he moves each time but the offset moves the correct amount of pixels. Eventually the little guy outruns the offset and goes off screen. I have no idea what is going on behind the scenes to make the little guy suddenly double his movement amount but not the offset. Arrgh!

I hope anyone reading understands.

Game Update 3: Tiny Little Dude - UPDATED

Never mind the programmer's art!

So, finally after wracking my head around seemingly simple problems, surviving Halloween and surviving the Elections I'm back with an update. Of course it's a good news, bad news update. But, with projects like these, it seems to be the norm.

The Good News
The good news is that I have my sprite class pretty much working. If you look at the picture above you'll see a little white knight among the tiled background. What the picture doesn't show you is that the little fellow is animated. There are four frames of animation and it seems to work pretty well.  In a way it's starting to feel like an Ultima style game.

Game Update 1: The Blue Screen Of Life!

It's not much but it's a start!

I figure that since I made a huge proclamation of making my own CRPG I should start updating on how it's going.  I mean really, come on, right?

So. Since I made my epic blog post I've worked on the game for a couple days now. Some of that time has been story related stuff and some of that time was getting Code::Blocks, Allegro 5 and Windows all to play nice. I finally got Code::Blocks, Allegro 5 and Windows all to play nice. Wasn't that hard. This is a good thing since when I start making the Linux version I'll most likely use Code::Blocks to develop the game.

Of course, the reward for my hard work is a window filled with blue.  That's okay though because it shows me that everything is working well together.