Work continues on the game I thought I could knock out in a week, Tollkeeper.  The plan was to make it fit in unexpanded TI BASIC to load from cassette, as one of the centerpieces to BASIC Pak 1, my next batch of games for physical release.  That limitation has proved to be a formidable challenge as the game inches closer to completion.

With this one, I had to get it up and working and actually play it for a while to determine how I wanted the AI to work for the one-player option.  Once I could actually get a game going, I realized it needed tweaking or the game would be essentially one long stalemate, but as I've tried to add these small changes I've kept bumping into the ceiling of my available memory.  Also, I'm unearthing bugs in code written early in the process that hasn't been fully put through its paces until now, when I can play multiple turns of the game.

I've realized that one element of the game - the R)eclaim option on the menu - might be superfluous enough to get deleted and save me a chunk of space.  The idea is, if two of the roaming caravans collide when they move, the tile on which it happens turns black and becomes 'barren,' with a value of zero.  Any future caravans that reach it will also be destroyed, and the tile can't be bought or attacked by either player.  The Reclaim option, only available if a player rolls a 6 and has an acre adjacent to the barren tile, allows the space to be reclaimed and put back into play.

I still have yet to play a long enough game where multiple caravans have crashed into each other, or where either player's empire has sprawled to the point where swaths of barren land are a problem.  It's not a huge piece of the code, and it may come up infrequently enough that it's better to just make barren acres a permanent thing, and force players to work around them.  

I aesthetically like the idea of the reclaim (it's also a part of the Enemy Lines board game, although there your pieces are in more of the caravan role and you're trying to navigate across the playfield).  But this is the "murder your darlings" portion of editing that I've never been great at, in writing or in code, and BASIC is forcing me to confront it.  I've at least wised up enough to do my code editing in Notepad and save annotated revisions, so I can immortalized that chunk of code in my notes if it ever needs revisited.  If cutting this out gives me the space to make the last edits I need and make the game playable, it's a worthy sacrifice, and it probably makes the game make more sense.

All this, and I still don't have the AI added!  I've already realized that my intended approach -- having the game make decisions and then reusing the code from the players' turn to make it look like someone's sitting there typing with you -- will likely not fit.  There will likely be a few broad strokes in the AI's process and then a quick update to the playfield, more similar in execution to the portion of the "day" when the NPC caravans move.  I'll probably release two standalone versions of the game, similar to the old-school releases with a keyboard-input version on one side of the tape and the joystick version on the other.  It seems weird to think of how few people will end up playing the two-player version I'm currently sweating over, but without it, a 1-player version would likely never exist.

Hopefully I can wrap this up quickly!  I've thought I was a day away from finishing it half a dozen times so far, though, so I'm not gonna hold my breath.  But I am gonna keep going, because this backlog of games isn't gonna finish itself.
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I'm thrilled to finally be releasing the first-ever physical media package from Orphantech!  Dice Crash, Sixxit, and Dice Rack are combined in Dice Pak 1.  Limited to 100 copies, this 5.25" floppy disk release comes bagged, with full color cover and labels, original cover art by Mark Bookwalter, an 8-page instruction manual, and even a 1" Orphantech button you can only get with this release.

I've always intended to release all my games on disk or tape, even though it's kind of a vanity project in 2021.  With the pandemic and some other life changes, I've had more time to devote to retro game coding and my collection, and I'm going to try to make up for lost time and do some of these things I've always wanted to do.  There's nothing quite like having your game in hand and playing it on "real iron," and this project has taught me a lot about putting such a package together.  My hope is to release my next two big games - Enemy Lines and Knight Invaders - either together or as their own separate packages later in spring or early summer.

I'll put up ordering information as soon as we're 100% ready to ship!

I'm also excited about Knight Invaders, a project I've had kicking around in my head for a while now.  The concept is more or less "chess meets Space Invaders" - you, as the King, patrol the bottom of the board, firing Pawns upward at descending Knights, Bishops, Rooks and Queens.  You have a certain number of moves to clear the board, and the pieces can either kill you when they reach bottom, or crash and become debris you can't get around.  You can hit them with Pawns or try to trick them into colliding with each other, but watch out for the Queen - she survives any collision, and can only be killed by a Pawn if it initiates the attack.  

I'm still working on the basic mechanics of the game loop right now, and already running into speed issues, so it's possible I'll be rewriting it for compiling.  I'm also trying to keep the code simple enough to make Knight Invaders my first real conversion project -- I'd like to rewrite it for several other systems.  

The interactive fiction I mentioned in the last update, A Ghost Without Dying, is on the back burner until I finish this game and Enemy Lines (which is so stupidly close to done, but so intractably weird in its AI issues, that I may have to dismantle big chunks of it and start over).  I hope to release Knight Invaders and Enemy Lines by summer, then clean up a few small game projects and get them out there, possibly as another "Pak" collection.  I also want to get some more text adventuring under my belt as a player before I go back into that monastery -- I want to make sure that when I get mine put together, that it's got puzzles and prose in equal measure, and offers something interesting to experienced IF aficionados.

It's been a grim year but coding and retro gaming has helped keep me intact in a chaotic time, and I hope you find as much escape and catharsis in our shared hobby, or in something else that moves you, to keep you carrying on.  Thanks for checking in!

I started working on my interactive fiction idea, "A Ghost Without Dying," and I quickly realized I should try to create an authoring program to create all the piles of data - room descriptions, objects, character dialogue, maps, etc -- that the game would need.  A lot of this is reinventing the wheel, of course, since text adventures have been around since the 1970s, but I'm trying to familiarize myself with file handling on the TI 99/4A so it's a good exercise.  I'm also interested in adding more character interaction than I've seen in classic IF that I've played.

I called the authoring system "Lamplight," and I'm adding sections to it as I go.  I created all the rooms, based on a hand-drawn map, and then added descriptions and directions.  I wrote an introduction and title screen, then finally started on the main game file.  So far all it's really doing is reading data off the disk.  Next I'll add in things like the conditions for winning, the movements of the non-player characters, and fight sequences.  I hope to have A Ghost Without Dying at least "travel ready" by the end of this week, even if all the game options aren't in place yet.

Once I finish this adventure, I want to move on to a couple other projects, but when I finish those I'll come back to Lamplight, expand its capabilities, and try to create a much more elaborate interactive fiction world.  Now that I've created an editor to help with a lot of the file setup, I can devote more time to the maps, puzzles and prose and make the game that much more atmospheric and unique.

I've started work on my next project, a text adventure called "A Ghost Without Dying." This will be a relatively small game, more of a chance for me to get familiar with TI 99/4A disk files and coordinating data between room text, inventory, players, and dialogue trees.  There will be plenty of spaces to explore, and what I hope is an engrossing story, as well as some characters you must interact with to achieve your goals.

It'll be another XB game, and one that I hope will work well from floppy disk on real iron, despite lots of disk access.  This will be a test run for some ideas I have for larger games down the road.  I hope to update every few days until I have something more concrete to show you.

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My newest game, Dicecrash II: Dice Rack, is now available for the TI 99/4A.  It's a sequel of sorts to 2015's "Dicecrash," and it takes a different approach to the "arrange the falling dice" idea.

I'm still working on the last little bit of Enemy Lines's AI, and continuing to struggle with decade-old code in that game, so I took a break to write this one as a sort of palate cleanser.  It was nice to start and finish a new project in a short time, and I think it's a neat little game.  I hope you enjoy it.

Besides Enemy Lines, I'm starting work on a text adventure called "A Ghost Without Dying," that I'll hopefully do more posting about here, to document my progress.  I'm really excited about trying a new style of game, and I have a lot of ideas for it.

Some time this year, I am planning a physical release of Dicecrash, Sixxit, and Dice Rack.  This will be a small run of floppy-disk based software in full packaging with manual.  In addition, I plan to use Dice Rack as one of my test projects to start converting games to other platforms.  My hope is to have it available for several other retro PCs, including a couple that may surprise you, by year's end.

I hope you're all staying safe and sane during these weird times.  Thanks for visiting.
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Ten years ago, Owen Brand proposed a 30-line programming contest on the AtariAge TI99/4A forums.  I had this idea for a little game, sort of like Stratego, but able to be packed into a small amount of code.  I thought making AI for it would be a matter of a few simple formulations, and I could knock it out over a weekend.

That idea quickly grew out of the 30-line restriction, and once I got the 2-player version finished (and exhaustively play-tested -- my son, who doesn't care for retro gaming, loved this one), I got frustrated trying to design the AI.  I eventually quit working on it, going back a couple times a year to poke the code with a stick and see if I could remember what I'd been doing when I wrote it.

I finally tackled the game again in earnest a few months ago, relearned the methods to 2010 Me's madness, and now it's about to be released.  The AI still needs a few tweaks, but I can stay with conviction that this is the most play-tested game I've ever released -- I've played hundreds of games with it.  Once the AI was decent, I got a bunch of matches in, and I still have a lot of fun with it.

The game is sort of a hybrid of Stratego, Risk, and checkers.  You get pawns across the board, and stop your opponent from doing the same, and your pawns are represented by numerals that designate their point value.  It's a pretty Pyrrhic game -- oftentimes it ends with winning scores in the single digits.  

I can't wait to get the final version uploaded and get to work on something else.  Patching new code into old is a mess, and I'm thrilled to start a new project from scratch, but I've learned more from Enemy Lines than any other game I've made so far, and I think it's the best thing I've come up with to date.  We'll see if you agree!
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After years of neglect, the site is finally showing signs of life again!  I made it a goal this year to restart my retro programming and get some new stuff released, and although I'm not as far along as I'd like, things are actually starting to happen here at HQ.

I made some life changes first - cleared out a lot of excess in my War Room, so I could actually enjoy my old machines again, and created an office workspace where I can actually get things done.  I set some goals for myself to get some games released this year and blocked out time to work on them.  I'm focusing on clearing up old projects off my "half finished" list -- either completing them, or deciding they're officially dead in the water and seeing if I can pick through the rubble for any future ideas.

Sixxit is a simple dice game I thought up a long time ago, loosely based on an old game we played when I was a kid.  I wanted to do a relatively small project to get myself back into programming mode and this one fit the bill nicely.  I like how its interface works, and I made two slightly different AI "players" to compete against.  I even made it possible for them to play against each other, so I could watch them and debug the game without having to enter keystrokes myself.

I'll have a couple new pages up on the site shortly for the other games I've finished for the TI 99/4A.  After that, I have two projects in various stages of completion: 100 Robots (title subject to change) and Enemy Lines (1-2 player board game).  I'm going to do a limited physical release this year of a couple games on disk with box and manual, and I have a few more ambitious game ideas after that.   I also hope to convert a few of these games to other platforms, starting with the Commodore Vic 20 and TRS-80 Model III.

Thanks for checking out the site, and let me know what you think if you get a chance to play Sixxit!
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I uploaded the beta version of Dicecrash, my new game in Extended BASIC for the TI 99/4A, to the AtariAge forums tonight.  You can copy and paste the code right into your emulator (I use Classic99) or download the .zip file in the thread.

I'm going to walk away from it for a couple days, then attack any cosmetic changes, bug fixes and scoring adjustments I want to make.  After that, I'll set up a page just for that game here on the site, and start actually blogging my next programming project.

You can look forward to long-winded musings on the nature of 35-year-old technology, the urge to code on obsolete platforms and my endless quest to carve coding time out of a busy life.  All that will be doled out amidst the actual posts where I talk about my sloppy coding and scrappy ideas.