In the 1980s and 1990s, text-based adventure games were commonplace. Many consoles back then were actually home computers, such as the Commodore 64, and programs were loaded via tape cassettes (a far cry from modern hard drives and solid state storage!). Games were developed by companies, but were also created and distributed via media such as magazines and radio broadcast (the idea was that a radio broadcast for a game would broadcast at a set time on a station and you would record the broadcast onto a tape cassette, and then be able to play the game on your computer).
Back then games (and other software) were developed in languages such as BASIC and then executed directly via the computer’s interpreter (BASIC was not compiled). They were extremely difficult to debug when compared to modern development processes (there was no IDE and no profilers).
One such game is Haunted House, which was distributed via a book designed to teach children the basics of programming. Back then BASIC was all the rage but trying to program in BASIC now is a whole new experience: no IDE, no profiler, no nothing (even today, the tools used for BASIC only provide the line and rough reason for an error).
Which is why I suppose one of my tasks is to firstly program Haunted House in BASIC (100% working) and then port it to modern C++ using the ASGE framework.
No responses yet