This is a necropost, resurrected from an old blog.
Wriggler
It was 1998 and I was 17. My tool of choice was QBasic and this is a game I wrote based on a concept I stole from another game called Wriggler.
The original Wriggler is a race game through a maze of bugs and creepy crawlies, played against the computer. My game would have been a race, had I gotten around to writing the computer player.
Instead it pits you, a plucky young worm (4 lines and a blob), against an army of anatomically incorrect spiders in your mission to see a duck and solve a single puzzle. Also there are some chocolate bars.
Anatomically incorrect spiders!
One whole puzzle!
A duck!
I fired it up once again to make a playthrough video. The game features some pretty old-school beep/boop sound effects, which really hit me right in the nostalgias!
Warning, this playthrough video contains spoilers for The Puzzle…
I don’t suppose there’s much to be learned from my code, but you can see it all on Github if that’s your groove and you’re welcome to have a tinker. I had some success running it with DOSBox.
I seem to have followed a fairly traditional sprite system, using QBasic’s built-in GET and PUT to grab and then render sprites. (You can read more about QBasic sprites in Ted Felix’s post here.) As a result, there’s a loading sequence where all the sprites are individually drawn to the screen before they are grabbed before the game begins…
I remember very little about the actual coding, but it seems like I also wrote some tools to edit the sprites in the game, and to design the rooms in the level. I stopped development roughly around the time I ran out of disk space it seems, and in the last moment of the game you see a teleporter system that I never actually finished. Early mentions of it are commented out in the code, which tells me it wasn’t working the last time I showed the game to someone.
It’s always fun digging up old projects. I can’t believe how far I got with this one!
I’m hoping I’ll be able to find some more amongst the dusty old floppies I’ve dug up so far…
