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This reminds me. At my college, it was required in our first semester that we make a windows command prompt based game. Not having much love for text adventure

This reminds me. At my college, it was required in our first semester that we make a windows command prompt based game. Not having much love for text adventures, some of us got clever and figured out how to take over the buffer and draw characters. So, we made games with ascii heros, traps and enemies etc. But one group took this to another level. They found the function to reduce the font size. They decreased it down to where it was about the size of a pixel or near enough. Then implemented a full CPU based renderer with perspective correct texture mapping and shaders.

brundolf 6y ago
We had a similar project, except the professor supplied a cpp file for drawing characters to X,Y coordinates. The refresh rate was atrocious, which forced us to get creative. It was odd but fun.
CryptoGhost 6y ago
In my studies in college we did not do anything with the Windows API (or any other OS for that matter). While I can appreciate the concept of basically just using standard libraries to teach CS fundamentals in theory, in practice it just means the only things available to you are mostly leetcode-esque academic coding. Would have loved an assignment like this in my 1st or 2nd year. I was probably not aware of stuff like curses libraries until my senior year if that.
bmcahren 6y ago
In highschool I made what I thought was a shit-tier space invaders out of printing to console one character at a time. Rather than keep a frame buffer of characaters, I was scanning and modifying specific "pixel" characters as needed for performance like game of life but home-brew for my character-based space invader type enemies. The game had a major memory leak by the time I got to presenting but that served as a perfect timer for the next player to get a turn. We didn't demo any other games once we got to it. After class, I was not happy how many times it crashed but somebody corrected me - it was the only actual video game anyone made. Most were card games or guessing games. Lost the source code because my floppy disk somehow got corrupted on the way home from the last day of school.
r3trohack3r 6y ago
Did this happen to be Digipen?
- tinyManCan 6y ago
  I had that exact same thought. Thinking back to abusing the hell out of the Windows NT console in Redmond back in 1999/2000.
- DubiousPusher 6y ago
  Haha, it sure was.
  - r3trohack3r 6y ago
    I was in a campus tour group the following semester and got to see a demo! Still keep a windows VM around to play Synaesthete.
dfee 6y ago
If you want to see some really cool and modern advances for this sort of task, check out the Ink cli framework: https://github.com/vadimdemedes/ink#readme https://github.com/vadimdemedes/ink#readme
rzzzt 6y ago
javidx9 has a series of videos on their home-grown console game engine, with the same "logical conclusion": https://youtu.be/xW8skO7MFYw https://youtu.be/xW8skO7MFYw
- kchr 6y ago
  I can really recommend his videos!
axbxcxdx 6y ago
I wrote something similar for a college software engineering class project - we were supposed to implement image filtering (blur, zoom and the like) and I wanted to be able to display the before/after pictures in the terminal. Source: https://github.com/donfreiday/graffiti https://github.com/donfreiday/graffiti

brundolf 6y ago

We had a similar project, except the professor supplied a cpp file for drawing characters to X,Y coordinates. The refresh rate was atrocious, which forced us to get creative. It was odd but fun.

CryptoGhost 6y ago

In my studies in college we did not do anything with the Windows API (or any other OS for that matter). While I can appreciate the concept of basically just using standard libraries to teach CS fundamentals in theory, in practice it just means the only things available to you are mostly leetcode-esque academic coding. Would have loved an assignment like this in my 1st or 2nd year. I was probably not aware of stuff like curses libraries until my senior year if that.

bmcahren 6y ago

In highschool I made what I thought was a shit-tier space invaders out of printing to console one character at a time. Rather than keep a frame buffer of characaters, I was scanning and modifying specific "pixel" characters as needed for performance like game of life but home-brew for my character-based space invader type enemies. The game had a major memory leak by the time I got to presenting but that served as a perfect timer for the next player to get a turn. We didn't demo any other games once we got to it. After class, I was not happy how many times it crashed but somebody corrected me - it was the only actual video game anyone made. Most were card games or guessing games. Lost the source code because my floppy disk somehow got corrupted on the way home from the last day of school.

r3trohack3r 6y ago

Did this happen to be Digipen?

tinyManCan 6y ago
I had that exact same thought. Thinking back to abusing the hell out of the Windows NT console in Redmond back in 1999/2000.
DubiousPusher 6y ago
Haha, it sure was.
- r3trohack3r 6y ago
  I was in a campus tour group the following semester and got to see a demo! Still keep a windows VM around to play Synaesthete.

dfee 6y ago

If you want to see some really cool and modern advances for this sort of task, check out the Ink cli framework: https://github.com/vadimdemedes/ink#readme https://github.com/vadimdemedes/ink#readme

rzzzt 6y ago

javidx9 has a series of videos on their home-grown console game engine, with the same "logical conclusion": https://youtu.be/xW8skO7MFYw https://youtu.be/xW8skO7MFYw

kchr 6y ago
I can really recommend his videos!

axbxcxdx 6y ago

I wrote something similar for a college software engineering class project - we were supposed to implement image filtering (blur, zoom and the like) and I wanted to be able to display the before/after pictures in the terminal. Source: https://github.com/donfreiday/graffiti https://github.com/donfreiday/graffiti