C64 Basic Dungeon Crawler: Stairs, Levels and Levelling Up (Part 11)

classichasclass

For those as confused as I was, the BASIC as written will not run on a C64 (two immediate notes: BASIC 2.0 doesn't have labels, and a variable like STATS would be illegal because it clashes with the status word ST). This only works in their custom IDE which "compiles" (read "adds line numbers, alters names and tokenizes") it.

leoc

A period, multiplatform alternative: Usborne's Write Your Own Fantasy Games by Les Howarth and Cheryl Evans from 1984 https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bxv0SsvibDMTel93SThEYkJkZHc . (Generously provided by Usborne https://usborne.com/gb/books/computer-and-coding-books )

teddyh

IIRC, the 1983 dungeon crawler Sword of Fargoal was written in real Commodore 64 BASIC.

EmX_3000

What a brilliant machine, it easily has the most active scene of any retro computer going at this point. It's a bit of a shame about the BASIC not taking better advantage of the hardware though. OTOH a lot of the brilliant programmers of today's era cut their teeth on the C64 (and Apple IIs) and probably had to resort to assembly code at times thus honing their skills. I had an Apple IIgs and it lacked an advanced BASIC to take full advantage of the video and sound capabilities. In fact home computers with a really good BASIC tuned to the computer's hardware capabilties were very rare.