(Parts 1 and 2 can be found as earlier blog entries, and are probably worth reading prior to this one).
My one hour demo of the RPG I had designed over the course of my bus stopover was pretty cool I don't mind saying. It was written in QBasic.
Now depending on your level of coding knowledge that either means nothing to you, or you just rolled your eyes/laughed out loud. See, QBasic is to programming what bashing a coconut repeatedly into your face was to the tool development of our caveman ancestors. Someone probably did it at some stage, but everyone else quickly learned from the resulting mess. Unfortunately QBasic was all I knew- the Computing teacher at my school (who was later fired for poor performance) only knew one language that he could teach us, and had merely hinted at some mythical Excalibur-esque prize for the greatest of programmers known as 'See-Add-Add', a prize that we would likely never taste. He also pronounced the word 'cache' as 'kay-sheh', but I digress.
Suffice to say QBasic was never going to allow anything beyond an NES level game, but by-golly I did it.
I was really proud actually, I wrote my own tile editor, character designer, level editor... the lot. After a great learning experience I had a demo, around one hour of exploration and battles that bear striking resemblance to Fall. I then decided it was going to be necessary to develop using a proper toolset on a much better system than the one it was currently on if it were ever to be seen by a wide audience. Alas university cranked up the workload, and time went out of the window. Incidentally they didn't use see-add-add at university either because of their belief that C and it's many variations were going to be obsolete by 2005, so I had to teach myself in my spare time along with DirectX and openGL. Good thing I didn't have anything better to do at the weekends than X-Men cartoons and waiting for broadband to be invented.
I still have all the code and programs- including the demo- which would make for an interesting experience, but unfortunately it won't run on modern computers. Without going into boring details the architecture of PC's has changed over time, so ironically my 8-bit quality graphics runs unplayably slow on a PC that can run Skyrim at maximum resolution. One day I may look into the options regarding salvaging it, but I have bigger fish to fry at the moment (Spoiler: Fall of Angels port to PC).
The demo did help me get a job at Eurocom Entertainment Software working on the latest Pirates of the Caribbean game amongst other things though, so it was productive in that sense as well as the personal experience. And it will make a great easter-egg in a future Fall of Angels instalment.
