Version 2.0 for Windows and Linux
Consider this a birthday party! September of this year will mark the 20th anniversary of the development of Dark Ages I: The Continents. Development continued through the winter of 1997 and was completed in the spring of 1998, and various bug fixes and upgrades followed over the next year or so. Then DA1 was shelved to begin production of the sequel. Surprisingly, the game continued to kick around the Internet, and is still playable today through the DosBox emulator. It was this resilience that inspired me to dust off the old QuickBasic code and do a reboot after 20 years. The end result is Dark Ages: The Continents version 2.0! I will be posting the first alpha release in a few days. Happy 20th Birthday DA1!
I decided to do a reboot after playing around a bit with Simple DirectMedia Layer. I was playing with the graphics modules for a project at work, but found the code so easy to work with that I could build a simple rendering engine for DA1 in minutes. After that, it was mostly a matter of scripting the storyline and recreating the interface. I struggled for a day exporting the original BSAVE (yes, from QBasic!) formatted graphics to bitmaps, but otherwise the whole process took only a week to build the game engine. Then I spent a few hours a week over the next few months coding the storyline and play testing. It was amusing to play through from beginning to end after nearly 20 years. It was even more amusing looking at my old QB code. I barely knew what I was doing back then, and it still compiled…somehow.
In the next few posts I’ll explain a bit more about the upgraded features, the features deliberately not upgraded (to maintain that NES aesthetic), and what I’ve learned in the process. I’ll post the code to GitHub, including the original QB source, just for grins.