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.
Well it’s been seven years since the website was updated. I suppose it was slightly overdue. DKS is still alive and well and software development continues,
although at a much slower pace. However, there are a lot of new items in the works.
On the site, I’ll continue building out DA2 content and walkthrough on the Wiki page. It will take a long time, so keep checking in. DA2 version 2.0
is in alpha release. It’s got a few features that need fixing, but otherwise is tons better than the version 1.2 release. And it works on modern
versions of Windows. I’ll say more on that in a future post. Finally, I think it is time to revisit DA1 and port it to Windows, possible mobile.
It might be a fun little project, particularly for anyone who hasn’t been able to play it because of its age. I still fire it up on DosBox every now
and then and I’m amazed at how well it holds up (except for the horrible music).
February 19, 2009 · First News Post
The latest build in the new version of DA2 has been available for over a week, but I thought I’d officially announce it in the news. It is mostly playable now, which is good. You can find it by clicking here. I’ve also updated the link section with a new webiste, Orbital Cows, where everyone can find tons of other games to play.
I’ll start updating the website over the next few months. Most of it will remain the same because the content is still relevant, but I need to update the links and start expanding the wiki. Other players can contribute to the wiki as well. It can be found here.
January 19, 2009 · First News Post
Well, it’s been years since the last update. It seems the migration to Vista will never be complete, but Windows 7 will probably change that. As a result, DA2 needs porting yet again to keep up with the modern operating systems - so much for backwards compatibility, right? Because I’m starting all over from scratch, I’m making several changes to the game interface. You can sample what’s done so far by clicking here. It is not a finished game. Many things don’t work yet because they have not been programmed yet. You can read more about the new version in the forum.
