YouTuber picks up the place he left off with RPG he began making virtually 40 years in the past on a Commodore 64

I think about loads of us had an thought for a videogame once we had been youngsters and possibly acquired so far as drawing some characters or maps in a pocket book. Mike Brixius went a bit additional. Starting in 1984, he began coding an RPG on a Commodore 64 with the working title Digital Dungeon Grasp, impressed by a few his favorites. He wished to mix the limited-line-of-sight dungeoneering of 1982’s Telengard with the get together of adventurers and overworld map of Ultima 4, and to set it within the fantasy world created for his homebrew Dungeons & Dragons marketing campaign.

Now, many years later, he is dug up the floppy disks in addition to pages of each handwritten notes and printed listings with handwritten feedback he deserted a while round 1989. A few of the disks had been corrupted, however others proved retrievable, and you may see footage from what he is acquired engaged on YouTube. “I’ve bits and items of the venture from numerous factors in its creation,” Brixius says, “however they do not all work collectively as you’ll be able to see by the font corruption in all my checks as much as this date.”

Although he is switched from coding in BASIC to Kick Assembler (KickAss for brief), he is determined to complete Digital Dungeon Grasp by remaining true to the imaginative and prescient he had for it as an adolescent. “You’ll be able to run across the floor world and discover what little map there’s thus far,” he says, “and in case you stand on the collapse that one mountain, you’ll be able to press X to descend into the dungeon. Within the dungeon you’ll be able to solely see areas the place your line of sight will not be blocked, and you may transfer round freely since there isn’t any test for walkability but.”

Brixius plans to work on it in quarterly sprints, with the primary devoted to ending the map code. “I will begin by getting the colours mounted in order that the dungeon partitions haven’t got the colours from the final outdoors map displayed,” he says. “I must make a change to the best way map knowledge is saved. Presently I am storing one byte for each different house in a checkerboard sample. Which means every wall house is represented by solely two bits. It is memory-efficient, however very limiting. There can solely be 4 states: a wall; a door; a secret door, which is represented by each having a wall and a door; or nothing there in any respect.”

He is documenting the method on Patreon, and placing selections on what he ought to work on up for public vote each there and on his classic {hardware} YouTube channel, RavenWolf Retro Tech, if you wish to participate within the venture. When it is achieved, Brixius goals for his RPG to be playable each with Commodore emulator VICE, and on the unique {hardware}—must you occur to have a Commodore 64 of your individual mendacity round in storage someplace.