Steam game written in... QBasic?

Monkey Archive Forums/Digital Discussion/Steam game written in... QBasic?

AdamRedwoods(Posted 2013) [#1]
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2033318/black-annex-is-the-best-qbasic-game-youve-ever-seen.html

It would be amazing for the game development community," said McDonald when asked about Black Annex's potential ascension to Steam. "It would show that even old, abandoned tools and the most basic pieces of software can still be put in the hands of someone who wants to create their dream and result in beautiful things happening."

]<ewl


benmc(Posted 2013) [#2]
"It would show that even old, abandoned tools and the most basic pieces of software can still be put in the hands of someone who wants to create their dream and result in beautiful things happening."

Uhm, sure. I guess. If that's what the developer actually did. He used QB64.net however. Tho it's "QBasic" at heart, it has very NEW functionality that could even rival Monkey :P


MikeHart(Posted 2013) [#3]
And at the end, does the user care about which tools the developer used? NO!


bram(Posted 2013) [#4]
Ha: 12000 lines of QBasic. That's not bad.


MikeHart(Posted 2013) [#5]
The problem with a lot of devs out there is that they blame the tool.

"Without feature X or Y, I can't create my game." or
"My tool is better than yours because X,Y,Z...".

But what are we trying to create here? Moving images that are controlled by programmed logic. WOW, very demanding. :-)))
The end user won't be able to tell which tool you have used. And 99% of the time you are able to create the same app with a wide range of tools. Been there, done that.
Once you realize that you waste your time searching the holy grail of a development tool, then you will start developing games. Everything else before that is waisting time and creating one prototype after another.
Settle for one, get to know it and create!


Gerry Quinn(Posted 2013) [#6]
"Settle for one, get to know it and create!" Well said, Mike!

I remember playing Gorillas! Good for the author of this new game.

It's not really all that surprising because what held back early Basic games were limitations on the early Basics (they might not always scale well, or be able to access graphic hardware properly) and less powerful machines that needed to be coded more efficiently than some of these languages could manage.

Modern languages are better structured for large projects too, but a good coder can write a decent sized project in even a relatively 'basic' Basic without having it fall apart.


Samah(Posted 2013) [#7]
@MikeHart: Settle for one, get to know it and create!

You sound just like therevills telling me off. :)

The only real "without feature X or Y" I've come across is wanting coroutines for a bullet hell game, but apart from that I don't really care about the tool as long as it gives me the end product I want.


MikeHart(Posted 2013) [#8]
You sound just like therevills telling me off. :)


Oooohhhhh nooooooo, don#t want that :-p

...I don't really care about the tool as long as it gives me the end product I want.


Same here. Yes, I use not only one tool but with Monkey, BMax, and a little Lazarus/FreePascal, I have all I need.
If it misses something and it turns into a problem, then it is just my own disability to get my head around a problem. But then, everything is there in the INET and just needs to be translated. Basically all the wheels are invented already. At least for my needs.


Neuro(Posted 2013) [#9]
Anyone remember the Truevision3D engine? I recall several years back (around 2005-ish when 3D engines were all the rage), i got into a huge flame war on their forum regarding what 3D engine can build a "professional" game and what can't. Obviously, the folks at TV3D felt that their engine was a true professional engine since it supported professional languages such C++, C#...etc..etc. I argued that any 3D engine (blitz3d, darkbasic3d, 3DGS, 3DRAD) can be used to make "professional" games as the end result is what matters as the gamers could care less how you made it, just as long as the game is great. But to my surprise, no one there was having it and even the mods stepped in (and sided with them of course) to shut down the thread with the final statement along the lines of : "TV3D is a professional engine, all the others are just toys.."

Wow..nuff said :).


MikeHart(Posted 2013) [#10]
Typical behaviour of fanboys. Critize their toy and they go nuts and personal. Been there, experienced something similar multiple times, smiled and shacked my head.


tiresius(Posted 2013) [#11]
In the early 90s, while in High School, I wrote a sci-fi RPG (think Ultima 4 movement with M&M 2 combat type of mashup) starting it with QBasic. At some point I needed to adopt multiple modules (or something else QBasic couldn't do) so I had to use my brother's QuickBasic 4.5 compiler. Then eventually my game could not be compiled to a finished EXE due to memory requirements so I switched to VB For DOS 1.0, which used expanded/extended memory.

Maybe I should dust off the code (it's only been about 20 years) and take another crack at it... since I stopped at around 70% of the way to a finished product!


Neuro(Posted 2013) [#12]
In the early 90s, while in High School,

Ya know, back in '95 I started working on a 2d platformer game (well...practically any game back then was in 2d) in Turbo Pascal 7.0. I never quite finished and even to this date, me and my friend would always joke about getting back to work on it one of these damm days :).

The funny thing is that I can still install Turbo Pascal 7.0 in DosBox, load the game code and everything still works :).


benmc(Posted 2013) [#13]
This would be a great Game Jam!

The theme: you must revive a game you started AT-LEAST 10 years ago :)

I have a great old "futuristic" dungeon crawler QBasic game I made in the 90's that I could bring back where you are basically the letter Q going through an ANSI maze of dungeons with a laser picking up hidden treasures.

The question is... where will I ever find a 3.5" floppy drive so I can get the .BAS off the disk????

EDIT: oh, and my tank battle game I almost finished in Delphi 5

This could be fun...


Neuro(Posted 2013) [#14]
benmc, i actually to buy a USB floppy drive in order to get all my old codes out from those 3.5in floppy disk :)! And its quite interesting to find what else has was stored in those tiny things too :).


tiresius(Posted 2013) [#15]
USB Floppy Drives.... I didn't even know they existed! I'm definitely going to get one.


benmc(Posted 2013) [#16]
Ha, I wouldn't even have searched for it :) I'm just as worried that the disks are ruined after sitting in a box in the garage for almost 20 years.

EDIT: Wow, and finding them for under $20 on Amazon too.


Powelly(Posted 2013) [#17]
Strangely enough I've recently revived a game I started over 10 years ago.
It's a remake of the old ZX Spectrum game Horace Goes Skiing, written in Blitz Basic.

I started writing it in 2001, got it to about 70% finished and then abandoned it. 11 years later I decided to revive the project and it's now finally finished.

After reviving the game I think I've ended up rewriting 95% of the code. I'm definitely a better programmer now than I was over a decade ago. Some of the old code was terrible.

If you want to check it out have a look here:
http://www.loadcode.co.uk/software/windows-software/horace-goes-skiing-remake/

The source code is in the standard download and requires Blitz Plus to compile.


Redbeer(Posted 2013) [#18]
"Not only are the simple visuals awesome, but the gameplay actually looks complex and tough to master—not something you'd expect from a programming language with simple loops and statements."

This line shows, at least to me, what little the author knows about developing pretty much anything. Other than canned functionality in engines or game development platforms, other than OO via Classes, which is really just another way to structure variables that hold data, and a few features to make language shareable, or readable, simple loops and statements is all coding is and has been since I started doing it almost 30 years ago now.


Gerry Quinn(Posted 2013) [#19]
Although I suppose we programmer types might show similar prejudice against games made with 'game creators'!