MS-DOS Weird DOS game I'm hacking together

[adventofcomputing]

Think this counts as retro gaming, but I've been slowly working on a janky DOS game in my spare time.
Here's the codebase:

https://github.com/WizardOfHaas/secret_of_uruk

The good stuff: it's a 100% text mode rouge-ish game written in x86 assembly language. I'm making aggressive use of custom fonts to generate in-game assets like this fellow here:

If you want to give it a spin, there's a makefile and everything. You will need nasm and dosbox, plus probably linux. No idea if the makefile will play nice with windows.

Right now the overall game engine is basically in place. It has simple inventory management, a turn based combat system, items, and simple inventory management. One of these days I'll put some more time into fleshing out the assets and game itself.

 

[Ramokromok]

Loving the idea of the swapping of the custom fonts to generate the graphics.

(I also love starting writing games, it's finishing them I have an issue with....)

 

[adventofcomputing]

(I also love starting writing games, it's finishing them I have an issue with....)

Hahaha, 100% with ya there. Need to set aside some time to build out at least a short demo area.

The font swap stuff actually pretty fun to work with. Since I'm in real mode I get to just use a BIOS call, I know I could do it via memory mapping but I'm a little lazy. I have a python script in the repo that takes an image, makes it into a B&W bitmap, then breaks it into little 8x16 font tiles for me.

What I've been getting curious about and might implement eventually are animations. The PC has a set of font pages, I think it's 8 slots or something, that can each have their own independent font loaded. So in theory one should be able to load a set of fonts then swap the active font page every frame. It _should_ be fast enough to look smooth for short animations. Anyway, just some idle musings.

 

[Ramokromok]

Well I’m looking forward to hearing how you get on! Good luck