Okay, here’s definitely the best game I programmed in high school — Dungeons Dank and Dismal. This one was done in Java and features some actual high-tech non-ASCII graphics. It’s a Diablo-style dungeon crawl game with some relatively sophisticated features, such as randomly generated dungeons, automapping, enemies that follow you around, a shop where you can buy better items, and an actual final level. Best of all, you can play it right in your browser right now:
Oh yeah, there are some bugs. I went off to college and got busy with classes and stuff, and I never really got a chance to debug this game or balance it properly. The most annoying thing is that it won’t let you buy the plate mail armor even if you have enough gold. Another really irritating bug is that sometimes the climactic last level is completely devoid of monsters — no idea why that happens. The dungeons are random, so sometimes it just so happens that the game is really easy and sometimes it’s impossible. Also, every once in a while the game throws out a dungeon where large sections of it are completely cut off and inaccessible. Even after you pick up a key, the game will continue to announce that “you’ve found the key” every time you pass over that square. Last but not least, the monsters can’t walk over any square where a monster has died — though maybe that’s not a bug and the monsters are all just really superstitious/deferential toward the dead or something.
Here’s another PASCAL game I programmed back in high school — Defender. (I was later told there was already a game called that. Whatever — I’m sure this one’s better.)
And yeah, this is just the shareware version. If you play through it and and are eager to get your hands on the full commercial version, well … don’t hold your breath.
Yeah, I probably should have posted this back in 1996, but better late than never, right? Here are some screenshots:
What makes it so great? Well, for one thing this has got to be one of the most thoroughly playtested levels in the history of video games. This map is basically what my friends and I did instead of high school. We played this map constantly as I was building it, and over months and months the level evolved to foster ever more elaborate wheels-within-wheels of strategy. Over a decade later friends of mine who’ve already spent hundreds of hours playing this map are still playing it.
So it’s a prison, right, and there are all sorts of buttons you can push that will open and close certain doors and seal off certain areas and activate certain traps. The basic layout is a ring, and if you’re in a stronger position you can create a block in the ring and then circle around the other way. Alternatively, if you’re in the weaker position you can shut a door and buy yourself some time as your opponent has to circle the ring. If you find yourself trapped in one of the cells, you can either hide and lie in wait for your opponent, or if you’ve got a rocket launcher you may decide a strategic suicide is your best option. The level discourages camping, as if you do your opponent will begin locking you away from all the best weapons. And to really excel you’ve got to learn all the ways into and out of the secret passage/torture chamber.
To play it you’ll need a copy of Doom 2 installed. Then copy the kprisn36.wad file into your Doom directory and type: doom2 -file kprisn36.wad
And make sure you’re using “old deathmatch” rules, otherwise all the strategy just goes right out the window.
Here’s a paragraph from my new story. Can anyone give me a definitive citation for how the dashes and quotation marks around “she held up her massive hands” ought to be formatted here? As far as I can tell there is absolutely zero agreement about this among published novels I’ve read.
“So that’s Abraxas. And he could be showing up here at any minute, and I’ll have to fight him. Now”–she held up her massive hands–“these hands are formidable things, but nevertheless, given the circumstances, I really wouldn’t mind having a weapon, you know what I mean? You getting the picture?”
I thought that the way I have it here was standard, even though I hate the way it looks and I’d do it differently if I could, but then I just noticed that the copy editor changed it on one of my other stories to something that seems to me even more random, so now I’m totally confused.
Love this. Here’s one of the most charming pieces of art I’ve come across recently: The Wishing Well by Travis Hanson. He’s got a clean, comic book style reminiscent of Bill Watterson, and the premise of this piece is delightful and inspired: Coins dropped into a wishing well end up in a dragon’s hoard.
Here’s the awesome trailer for the new film Inception, which I hear is quite good. I haven’t gotten a chance to see it yet, since I’ve been busy with Alpha.
It seems to me that the emotional center of this trailer is the part where Leonardo DiCaprio says fervently, “I think I found a way home, and this last job … that’s how I get there.” Without that, the trailer would just be a lot of guns and exposition and gravity-defying stunts — which is all cool, but it’s that emotion that really makes the whole thing click. I’m reminded of one of Kurt Vonnegut’s rules of writing, which is, “Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.” I almost talked about that rule in my lecture at Alpha, but in the end I left it out because I had too much material already and that rule wasn’t really relevant to the topic under discussion, but now I sort of wish I’d mentioned it and showed the Inception trailer and said, “See? See how much more powerful that one line makes it? Characters who want something are compelling.”
Here’s a cool sketch of me reading my short story “The Ontological Factor” at Confluence, done by a very talented member of the audience. Usually I only get to see sketches of myself when I’m the defendant (those charges are bullshit, by the way), so this was a nice change of pace.
The latest fictional offering from Lightspeed magazine is “Manumission” by Tobias S. Buckell, an origin story for his character Pepper, who also appears in the novels Crystal Rain, Ragamuffin, and Sly Mongoose.
Hey, no way! Wow, there’s lot of great stuff on this old CD. For example, I found a copy of my old game “Caerion,” which I programmed in PASCAL back in high school. I thought it lost forever. I even got it running on my MacBook using a free DOS emulator called Boxer:
I had big plans for this game (hence the overly-optimistic designation of map “6″), but not long after this version was created I ran up against a memory limit in my PASCAL compiler, and I decided to move on to other programming languages. So the game’s only got two maps. This makes the Gauntlet-style single player/co-op mode (”Quest”) a bit pointless (and the monsters move way too fast in my emulator), but the Doom-style multiplayer deathmatch mode (”Duel”) is still pretty fun, and my friends and I actually spent a fair amount of time playing it. And it’s available now as FREE download! If nothing else you should witness the devastating power of the “Firedeath” spell; I’m still pretty proud of that one.
HOW TO PLAY: Press S to summon the blue player. Use W, A, D, and X to move. Some doors can only be opened with the appropriate key. Pick up melee weapons and spells. Press Z to switch between melee weapons. If two players bump into each other, both take damage depending on the other’s melee weapon. Press Q and E to rotate the white arrow that aims the direction of your spells. Press S to cast a spell. Press C to switch between spells. Players can’t cast spells if an opponent is standing in an adjacent square. If you die, press S to respawn. The controls for the other players are the same, except using the G, L, and 5 keys in place of S. (If your keyboard doesn’t have a Tic-Tac-Toe style number pad, the gray player is going to be basically unplayable.)
