I sometimes wish text adventures would still have a bit more prominence today. It's nice to see games at super-high fidelity, but these old-fashioned text adven

I sometimes wish text adventures would still have a bit more prominence today. It's nice to see games at super-high fidelity, but these old-fashioned text adventures are so "easy" to make, they're a fantastic way to get into programming as a hobby. As a kid, learning to code was reasonably easy because it was fun; I could make games for my family and friends, and at the time I started, not much was required other than access to a pirated disk of Turbo Pascal or Q-Basic. I remember when Mode 13h took over and things got a lot more complicated (and also fun, for those who could work it all out). Once I had mastered Mode 13h, a whole new world opened but I wondered how someone could dive into programming if that was the first hill to climb. And then the demo scene hit me, along with hacky but exciting 3D-2D projections, from plasmas and fractals to Voxel graphics (Commanche!), and that eventually required even more complicated maths that threw me out of the game-making. I remember at the time that I couldn't wait to "grow up" and reach a stage in school where they'd teach me the maths necessary to keep up with the requirements of game design at the time. I never returned to it, unfortunately. Text adventures were a fantastic and light-weight way into all of it. Every time I try to convince a kid to try and make one, they struggle to get excited about it. They want to make Minecraft and Fortnite, and I don't even know where to begin to explain. So, yeah. Time to learn Unity. For anyone curious to travel back in time over Christmas or so, here's a bit about Mode 13h: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_13h https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_13h And here's a nice book on Game Design of that era, around the infamous Wolfenstein 3D: https://fabiensanglard.net/gebbwolf3d.pdf https://fabiensanglard.net/gebbwolf3d.pdf