My First Dungeon That I Wroted All By Myself

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 20, 2011

Dunno why my brain was going there, but for some reason I was thinking of the first(ish) RPG I ever wrote. No, it wasn’t Hackenslash. I don’t remember if it even had a name. It was a game for the Commodore 64 that I wrote (in BASIC!) when I was a kid. For sure, it was the first one I wrote which anybody other than me played.

The dungeon was represented with character graphics in the Wizardry-style 3D view. The C-64 had some simple graphics tiles you could use for making games, especially card games and simple maze games. I wussed out a little bit, though, and only displayed one room at a time. With doors. I’d done tech experiments where I rendered more complete halls, but the more important consideration for this game was the size of the dungeon.

You see, I made the dungeon 10 rooms x 10 rooms x 10 levels. That’s 1,000 rooms / squares. If I only used 1 byte per room, then it only used up 1K of my available 38k or so of working RAM (the core operating system and BASIC language and reserved memory ended up taking up the rest).  So the entire dungeon was generated at the beginning of the game inside of 8 bits. They were arranged something like this:

Bit 0: If set, there was a door to the north.

Bit 1: If set, there was a door to the east.

Bit 2: If set, there was a door to the south

Bit 3: If set, there was a doorway to the west.

Bit 4: If set, there was a staircase going up to the previous level here.

Bit 5: If set, there was a staircase going down to the next level here.

Bit 6: If set, the player had visited this room already.

Bit 7: Don’t remember. Probably unused.

In the random maze generation code, I would have to reciprocate the values. So if one room had bit zero set (north door), the room to the north had to have bit 2 set (south door). Of course, the idea was that you could also have one-way doors and stairs that way, too, but I never got that far.

All monsters and treasure were generated at random. When the player entered a room, it checked bit six to see if the player had been there before. If not, then it generated a potential encounter at random. It also generated a treasure at random.  And it set that bit for future reference. If the player had been in the room before, there was a much smaller chance of a random encounter, and no treasure.

Separate from this 10 x 10 x 10 array, I also kept track of the location of the big treasure of the dungeon – I think it was a mystic orb or something. It was always somewhere on the last level of the dungeon.  If you entered the room with the orb, you automatically picked it up. Probably before combat happened.

I’d intended to have equipment in the game, which were really just higher bonuses to attack and and defense. I think I had two spells – an attack spell and a healing spell, cast by a magic user and a cleric. And – oh, yes, it was party-based. You had to make your party in advance. I had fighters, magic-users, clerics, and thieves as the core classes. And like so many RPGs, the thef was a pretty useless class. I intended to have traps in the game at some point, as an encounter type that the thief could bypass, but I never got that far. And equipment never happened. You COULD level up, though, and every gold piece you picked up in the dungeon added to your experience point total.  There was no other use for gold.

I had some very rudimentary, cheesy sound and music for victories, and no graphics for the monsters.

The random dungeon generator made sure there were no doors that led past the edges of the map. But otherwise, it simply assigned doors randomly, making sure every room on the map had at least one door. usually two or three.  Stairs were scattered about more randomly, but all levels had at least one staircase going down.  Often 2 or 3. Of course, this algorithm didn’t guarantee that the every room was accessible, or that the game was winnable.

Maybe at higher level, your magic user was supposed to learn some kind of passwall or teleportation spell. I don’t know that I ever really thought that far ahead.

But I did have a couple of friends come over to play it, and we had a silly time making characters, fist-pumping the air when my off-key victory music played.

The code is long-gone now. My memories of it are less than perfect.

At least I can say that Frayed Knights is a better game than the one I wrote when I was fourteen.

Filed Under: Programming, Retro - Comments: 10 Comments to Read



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