In early 2019, @beejjorgensen gave a tech talk for the Bend Hackers Guild introducing the Rust language. The talk and language were very interesting, but a tangential detail stuck out. Beej had taught himself Rust by using it to implementing a 40 year old game called Wizard's Castle. In support of that, he researched the origins of the game, got it's original source code, and reverse engineered a technical spec. All that info is here, and I recommend giving it a look through, it's pretty awesome.
Inspired by this, I decided to use the same game to learn F#.
You may now be noticing this repository is C#. I decided to start by creating the game (or at least a solid start) in C# a language I know well. Lacking Beej's lifelong knowledge of the game, this will give me a chance to learn it's ins and outs without learning something else at the same time. Eventually, I'll link to the F# project from here.
This project is written in .NET Standard, so given a Visual Studio or VS Code environment and Nuget, you can run it in the usual ways.
For Example:
dotnet builddotnet testdotnet run(from the WizardsCastle project folder)
MVP of the game is complete. The Player can navigate the Castle, fight monsters, find the Runestaff and use it to acquire the Orb of Zot, and acheive victory by escaping the Castle.
The most complicated remaining additions are Trade, Lamps/Flares and Blindness. Trade is the most important addition to make gameplay more enjoyable.
These things are all pretty easy to find on the spec page.
Additional work to complete the game
- Complete player creation impl
- Option to Buy lamp
- Choose Gender
- Vendors
- Sell Treasure
- Combat
- Populate map and handle room effects for the following
- Crystal Orb
- Books
- Treasure
- Flare effects, place them on the map
- Curses
- Recipes
- Random messages
- Spells
- Bribery
Other issues
- Got a sinkhole loop in testing. Probably only matters on the small map, but maybe something to think about fixing.
- It would be nice to see your numerical position when you see the map.