Even
though I grew up in 1970-s and 1980-s, I kind of missed the whole era
in personal computer technology revolution, being born on the wrong
side of iron curtain and in a remote part of the country. However in
the West the micro revolution (technological and commercial) was at
full swing. I bought my first micro computer in the early 1990-s and
because it was an outdated 8-bit Commodore C-64, I learned to love
whatever genre of software was available for this kind of hardware. I
also was kind of "forced" to learn programming (well, not
really forced, since programming a computer appealed to me since I
was 14 years old and I learned BASIC long before I bought my first
computer). Today, your typical teenager will not even take a second
look at the text adventure or interactive fiction game. Because of
that, it became kind of a lost art on the video game market and in
programming and game design area. However it is still a great way for
a young apprentice of the profession to learn programming techniques
and language while making one's own text adventure game - the genre
that was once considered the most technically advanced in the video
game category. Today I live in the West. I buy old books and hardware
to make up for lost years and being a geek and a professional
programmer I enjoy my hobby projects, which include creating this
kind of games using various technologies, including good old (some would
say - "bad old") BASIC as well as modern languages like Java or C++. To
re-introduce myself to C++ and its new standard called C++11 I
started my Text Adventure Game Engine project in C++ early this year.
I learned C and C++ in in the late 1990-s and worked for a local
software company as a programmer, but very briefly. When I came to
the US in 2000 on the Y2K bug wave, my job duties slowly drifted away
from programming as my company outsourced most of the development to
overseas, and now I spend most of my time reading the code and
looking for the bugs rather than developing new software. This is a
professional death for a programmer, so to keep my programming skills
at the least minimum, I spend big chunk of my spare time on
non-commercial private programming projects. The Text Adventure Game
Engine is such a project and I'd like to use this opportunity to
create a guide in this blog to describe the principles of the Text
Adventure Game genre in video games category and the process I went
through while creating my software.
This
projects is still under development, perhaps it will be for a long
time or it will never reach a "production" grade since
nobody pays me for that and spare time becomes scarce these days for
me - the future will show. My initial thought was to finish the
project first and then create one or more blog entries about it and
publish it for others to enjoy. However I can not wait any longer and
while my passion about the project is still at its peak, it is I
think the best time to write about it. So I start this series now and
I will see where it leads me. I believe that writing about some
technical issues I've had or will have will actually help me to
resolve some of them. Therefore this blog should be helpful for me
and I sure hope some beginner programmers and/or Text Adventure genre
enthusiasts will find this guide helpful as well.
In
the next episode I shall summarize the Text Adventure Video Game
genre, its history and where it stands today. In the episode after
that I will start my technical guide to programming your own text
adventure game system.
I
started a similar project for the old outdated hardware of Commodore
Plus/4 in BASIC 3.5, although I cheat a bit by using modern
development tool: CBM Prg Studio, a free software by Arthur Jordison
which allows the cross-development for various historical Commodore
hardware platforms, like C64, C128, C16, C Plus/4, VIC20 and PET.
It
is (arguably perhaps) a far more enjoyable way of creating
applications (due to severe limitations of BASIC editors on these old
computers) for these retro machines. I
plan to create a blog about that one as well. Currently though the
C++ game engine project is far more advanced and I think I am going
to focus mostly on this one.
This
is all for now.
Bye,
bye!
Marek Karcz, 6/14/2014
