REM BAGQUEST README

"Bag of communion tokens" by east_lothian_museums is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

TL/DR:

This little text action RPG is a labour of love for me. I first imagined the concept for this game while I was revising uwu.lisp, which, as you may not know, is a very simple Unicode tamagotchi clone for Common Lisp.

The idea is fairly simple: you have a "world of bags", as one might put it. That is, you move into and out of bags which have portals inside them, linking them to other one-dimensional planes of existence.

The Premise Of The Bag Quest

Okay so you have decided to keep reading...

A screenshot of BAGQUEST.BAS running in VICE Commodore 64 emulator.

The premise of the game is simple enough:

Out laid before you are forty (40) tiles.

You are the @ symbol, and you can move left or right.

There is no tangible objective to the game, other than to have fun.

The following are the current total number of objects in the game, and their symbolic character representations:

• player character - @
• a bag entry - B
• a bag exit - X
• a key for a locked door - K
• a greedy lil goblin - G
• a (locked) door - D
• a pile of treasure loot - L
• a magic wand - W
• a treasure map - M

Place a bag entry by pressing the B key on your computer. Then, to enter the bag, move onto its tile.

In order to move back out of that bag, move onto the X tile you find in the bag you have just entered.

Goblins, G, and doors, D, are both obstacles to the player. In order to move past their tile, you will need to bribe goblins with loot L, and unlock doors with keys K. Both of these items can be found littered within the bags you discover.

Added to this are magic wands W and treasure maps M.

Wands will whisk players away to a random empty tile within a randomly selected bag.

Treasure maps, however, allow players the choice of bag they wish to enter--at the added risk that they will not know onto which tile within the bag they will end up!

A Word To The Wizards

The data structures for the game are as simple as I could possibly make them, which limits the total number of bags one may possess to ten (10), but it should not be difficult to modify the code further to increase the total number of bags, and their attendant sizes, with a little exploration from the user, if they were to take the initiative.

A world of bags may be modelled thus:

130DIMW(40,10):REMWORLDARRAY
140DIMB(10):REMBAGPARENTCONNECTION
150DIMBX(10):REMBAGENTRYPOSITIONS
160DIMBY(10):REMBAGEXITPOSITIONS
170CURRENTBAG=1:REMSTARTINBAG1(MAINWORLD)
180P=INT(RND(1)*40)+1:REMPLAYERPOSITIONONINIT
190HAVEBAG=10:REMSTARTWITH10BAGS(??)

Each full-stop in the printed array W is a one-dimensional position in a line which the user may inhabit one-at-a-time.