The Challenge

Anthony had challenged himself to write a game in one page of code, 80x60 characters. He finished with a pretty neat game called sandworm.

I thought the idea was pretty cool, so I tried to do it myself. I decided to see if I could do mine in 3D. After playing around a bit I figured out I could get the 3D and windows going in about 11 lines leaving me with plenty of space for my game. Then as I started to play with some ideas I got a simple action RPG game going, very Zelda like. I figured if I was careful I could get about 4 dungeons connected by an over world together.

This is when things started to go wrong. I kept adding little details; new rooms, tile types, monster types, weapons… Pretty soon I was up to a page and change and only had my first dungeon done. At this point I realized I was not going to get it under a page and have everything I wanted. I was about ready to give up when Anthony (to get me to finish) added the two page challenge to his web site. He did it just to make me finish it.

So now I am thinking to myself, “well the framework is already written I should be able to get it all in the next 40 lines.” Yeah right. Being me I kept adding extra stuff.

Well so much for the two page RPG… Let’s make it three…

So at this point I’ve pretty much blown the 120 line budget. Now the game weighs in at 165 lines. Only 45 lines over budget, maybe no one will notice. I could probably remove about 10 lines from the game before I have to start removing actual working code to get it down. But at this point I like the game how it is so I don’t want to remove anything.

So I have decided to call it done just so people can play it.

Here is the game.
Here is the code.

The goal of the game is to gather the Quad Force together. I would have needed four pages to add the princess to rescue. Your character is the little blue sphere in the middle. Movement is done with the wasd keys. Heath are the bubbles in the upper left hand corner. Pieces of the Quad force are in the lower right corner as you find them. There are items you will pick up along the way that will give you new abilities. Three of these are tied to the 3 mouse buttons and will be displayed in the upper right corner as you get them. Play around with them to figure out what they do.