John's Fortress

The first game I ever made, it started off as a three-line text adventure which I coded the night I brought QBasic home from school, housed on a standard floppy disk. The next day I spent my lunch break and, if I recall, my art class working on it (along with classical art, we had weekly art classes to learn how to use Corel Photo Paint proficiently). I tried to incorporate as much from the help files as possible, including randomisation so you were forced to play everything in sequence. I also screwed around with different screen modes (a bad idea).

My big problem was that for some tasks, like taking the water, there was an incredible number of things people might type: check water, take water, grab water, read water, read water bottle, take the water, drink the water, and so on. Only much later did I learn how to use an INPUT statement that searched an entire sentence for a specific word. Here you have to type precisely what it needs or it doesn’t work. In the uncompiled version I had about 30 variations for each situation, but this wouldn’t compile, so I trimmed it down to about 5 obvious ones (try to keep what you type simple). Most kids in my class liked this, with one playing it to the point where he timed himself and claimed he could finish it in under 20 seconds.

According to the credits it took me 3 weeks to write.