Playing Telengard - Again.
Strangely enough, with all these wonderful games that I need to finish, what am I finding myself playing? This thing:

It's a near-perfect remake of Telengard, an old C-64 game... one of the first CRPGs I ever played. The guy who did the remake went on to worth on the indie RPG Fate.

I've talked about this game before. It was the original "mega-dungeon" game, differing from "modern retro" titles like Nethack in that the dungeon layout is the same every game - all two million procedurally generated rooms of it. Everything ELSE about the game is as random as you could ask for. Most of the "skill" required in playing this game was relegated to having good risk-assessment skills. And mapping skills. At least, that was the case after about level 3 or 4. Up until then, a random encounter with a demon or dragon and a botched Evade would mean game-over.

For some bizarro reason, I felt like playing it again. And I found that you could save the game in the middle of the dungeon (at least in this remake - I don't remember about the original). Reloading a saved game takes seconds instead of minutes on a modern PC, which makes the game a LOT easier to plow through.

As you can tell if you look closely at the screenshot, you can see I tweaked my savegame file at level 1 to beef up some stats to 18... not that I know they do anything. Some of the other stats were increased via fountains, like Charisma - which does seem to have a minor effect on increasing the chance that monsters may like me and heal me or give me things. There were also some other slots for the bonus for swords & stuff, but I decided to play it straight. Apparently, high stats don't save you from a zillion bloody deaths in this game.

When I was a kid playing this game on my C-64, I never made it too far. One bad encounter with a teleporter room to whisk me down to level 30 or something, and I was toast. But I was always curious if there was anything different about level 50 than level 2. Besides no more stairs or pits leading down. I spent some time looking over the game's code (it was written in BASIC with some machine language subroutines), but never found anything. No big goal or anything.

Replaying it on the PC with the advantage of mid-game saving and easy, fast reloading, what took me weeks on my C-64 at age thirteen or fourteen could now be accomplished in just a few hours. Sitting on a throne has a chance of increasing or decreasing your level (about an equal chance of either, plus a chance of doing nothing, or teleporting you to a random location). So I'd save the game after a level-up, and restore after a level-down. A half hour of this saw my dude up to 22nd level. Another level-raise saw my experience points wrap around into negative number space, so I guess I'm about as high level as I'm gonna get.

So I proceeded to find a way down to the lower levels of the dungeon - and got my clock cleaned. Repeatedly. The key is to acquire the most powerful magic items. Otherwise, the critters down on the lower levels will do more damage than you have hit points in a single hit. I've had traps go off on treasure that killed me instantly!

The nice thing about this game is that without anything by way of a plot, story, or quests, it's something you can just play for ten or fifteen minutes and make some progress, without expending any more brain-cell energy than you would in a game of Solitaire. Which is exactly how I play it.

If you want to really cook your neurons a bit, here's a listing of the source code in BASIC for the entire game. I think the combat system alone in Frayed Knights is twice as big as this entire game. I'm not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing:

TelengardListing.txt

Warning: There isn't much by way of comments in this file. See, in the old days with interpreted languages like BASIC, comments consumed both precious processing cycles AND limited memory space.

There's an annotated listing available from AtariHQ by Dan Boris which might be even more valuable for an aspiring game developer wondering how in the heck something like this could be fit in 32K of RAM (which is, I think, significantly smaller than the screenshot above uses).

Telengard Code Plus Comments and Tables

Hmmm... that's what the world needs more of today: Gigantic, web-based, multiplayer MEGA-DUNGEONS. I'm sure we've got a few of them out there, don't we?

Labels: retro, Roleplaying Games

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