("Bloomer style"? Could that sound any dumber? Why did I ever go with this handle?)
Eighteen years ago, Jason Honestgamer was in nappies* and I was in high school. I discussed Jason's high achievement-for-age ratio with him in a chat just the other week, where I praised his ability to walk at age twelve and the like. In roughly the same year as he took those steps – which was 1991 – I programmed 90% of a war/strategy game for the Apple II called Warlords, which actually has a few similarites to the HGWars we are participating in today, and thus which you may enjoy reading about after this screenshot:
(* This is a lie)
Links to other screenshots are at the base of this post.
In the game, four warlords square off for control of gold and real estate across a grid of cities. You can have up to four human players participating, with any spare slots being played by the computer, or you can even watch four computer players fight each other.
There are various kinds of units you can muster, all with different abilities. Humans have recruiting charisma, dwaves are good at robbing, elves can construct stuff like war machines, ogres are great fighters. You can buy weapons, move resources from city to city, destroy cities, and also, if you're unlucky, be pestered by the anti-warlord City Guard. But the Guard are as likely to pester any other players as well, including computer players.
The regular battle programming is the incomplete part of the game. The program has to distribute all your weapons, from best to worst, across all your units from best to worst, each time a battle is initiated. This was difficult for me to write efficiently in BASIC on a 1 Mhz computer, and proved painfully slow when executed during the game. So Warlords ended up being another of my 90% complete potential masterpieces.
Another cool thing about the game is that it has a double hi-res title screen that I was able to display from BASIC via the 'Dazzle Draw' hack. But as per many of my games, the hack doesn't work under emulation. I can't believe the high percentage of my games that trip up Apple II emulators! They can run Prince of Persia just fine, but they can't run my own 'Dragon' without screwing up the sound, or Warlords without warbling the title screen.
MORE WARLORDS SCREENSHOTS:
Rob'n'recruit
The Royal Guard
Bloomer in Vorpal
Supplies to Bluegate
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sashanan - April 15, 2009 (03:03 AM) My own attempt at a QBasic-based wargame - inspired mostly by Defender of the Crown - never got into the actual programming stages. I only wrote up a quick design document, but didn't have enough grasp of what I wanted to get any code done. If I were to retry it nowadays, it would probably be a different story. My C# is certainly up to the task and I daresay I know my game theory a lot better than I did those 12 or so years ago. |
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