Announcing Dunric's 1 to 2K Text Adventure Competition

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Announcing Dunric's 1 to 2K Text Adventure Competition

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<p align="right"><b><font size=3>July 27, 2004</font></b></p>

<p><font size=3><b>Announcing Dunric's 1 to 2K Text Adventure Competition</b></font></p>
<p><font size=3>Dunric's new contest is a test of budget coding at its finest.</font></p>
<p><b>Dunric</b>, a QB coder who is famous for his gigantic text adventure <b>Westfront PC: The Trials of Guilder</b> as well as some other ASCII graphics games like <b>P.R.O.G.U.E.</b>, has made a dozens of text adventures in his day. In fact, on his <a href="http://www.geocities.com/dunric/westfront.html">text adventure site</a>, over twenty-five original text adventures are available for download. Most of them were written in QBasic.<br><br>Over the years, Dunric has wrestled with optimizing his text adventure code to make it as memory-efficient as possible. His reasoning is not only philosophical: it's practical too. Dunric has done this so that he can fit the biggest and most impressive adventure games into the miniscule amounts of RAM available on early personal computers. <br><br>Back in June, Dunric got the idea that others might also enjoy his hobby of budget adventure game coding, and so he opened up a contest for interested text adventure programmers.<br><br>Here is his contest invitation, released on the Yahoo! QBasic group, as well as at other locales around the Internet.<br><br><blockquote><br>I am organizing a 1 to 2KB text adventure competition. See below:<br><br><a href="http://panks.freeshell.org/advcomp.html ... br><br>"Is it possible to write a text adventure in under 2K of RAM? Some<br>people have tried, and some have succeeded.<br><br>I would like to officially announce the formation of The 1st Annual 1<br>to 2K Classic Text Adventure Competition. I will be accepting BASIC,<br>C/C++, Fortran and Assembly language submissions for 1 to 2K text<br>adventures written for the following computing platforms: Commodore<br>64/128/+4/Vic-20/PET, TI 99/4A, IBM PC/PCJr, Atari 400/800, Apple<br>II/IIe, Sinclair, TRS-80, Color Computer, Acorn, Tomy Tutor, Bally<br>Astrocade, Linux, Mac and Windows/DOS.<br><br>Please submit your 1 to 2K adventure games to me. The 2K size can be<br>either the source coce, or the EXE, BIN, OBJ, PRG, ELF or other<br>self-contained, self-running binary. So you can thus have, say, a 8K<br>source code listing, so long as the binary format doesn't exceed 2.9KB<br>of size. You may also crunch the binary down with a compressing<br>program such as UPX or Winzip. The competition officially begins on<br>June 28, 2004, and runs through September 29, 2004. I will post all<br>submissions, regardless of when they were submitted, and then review<br>them and post grades on this page on October 7th. Good luck! =)<br><br>To help get you started, see my 8KB adventure game, in BASIC, called<br><a href="http://panks.freeshell.org/melark.zip">The Melarkian</a>.<br><br>Sincerely,<br><br>Paul Allen Panks<br>dunric@gmail.com<br></blockquote><br><br>Dunric's competition has already been open for more than a month, and has had several entries already. They include "Illusion", by Eric Eve, "The Traveler's Keeper", by Bill Loguidice, "The Fall", by Marco Pontello and Dunric's own "B-Venture". Most of the entries thus far have been written in QBasic or QBasic-compatible BASIC dialects.<br><br>If you are interested in this competition, check out <a href="http://panks.freeshell.org/advcomp.html">the official site</a>.<br><br>Additionally, you can find several interesting articles on text adventures at <a href="http://dunric.blogspot.com/">Dunric's Blog</a>, and Dunric's original text adventure programs are available at his <a href="http://www.geocities.com/dunric/westfro ... >Westfront PC and adventure game site</a>.

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