some news

blake at kingdomrpg.com blake at kingdomrpg.com
Sat Apr 22 19:01:34 UTC 2006


> I had about 3 years of fun with Basic and about 500 pages of exercise
> booklets, and nothing more. I think two important elements to that
> success were that the Commodore64 had zero extraneous interface, and
> that the booklets started from explaining the keyboard.

I face that one a lot. I learned from David Ahl's "BASIC Computer Games"
books. All teletype style stuff, at first.

1. Type in listing printed in cramped dot-matrix replicated smudge.
2. Run.
3. Fix typos.
4. Repeat 2 & 3 as necessary.
5. Embellish with graphics, sounds, more gameplay.
6. Refactor
7. Repeat 5 & 6 while interested.

Of course I didn't know I was "refactoring" at the time. Say what you want
about BASIC, it was =powerful= motivation (at least to me) to find better
ways of doing things.

Fortunately or unfortunately, the base level systems are a lot more
complex now.

===Blake===





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