I've always been a fan of text adventures - exploring a fantasy world, drawing a map and solving a few puzzles along the way. A couple of my early favourites were The Hobbit and Heroes of Khan. When I discovered shareware I spent hours puzzling over Humbug, Curses and t-zero. Even now I'm still working through The Lost Treasures of Infocom :-)
So when I needed a project to exercise my new 8086 assembly skills a text adventure seemed the natural choice. I decided to cram as much as possible into a 4K program - verb-noun parser, text decompression and a snowy forest to explore.
After 35 hours coding I'd created 4K Adventure complete with dwarves, mischievous elves and stolen magic. It managed to work despite the spaghetti code and a couple of dubious algorithms!
Impressed that I'd actually completed a project I immediately started work on a sequel and a simple operating system... I still haven't completed either. Maybe one day ;-)
- 4K Adventure is available to download from The Interactive Fiction Archive and runs perfectly using DOSBox.
So how do you know if you've won the game?
ReplyDeleteI just downloaded this from a DOS archive, looking forward to playing it. Your gift keeps on giving!
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