Dungeon Hacks
Written By David L Craddock
Back in the 1970s, most people when they think about video games Pong comes to mind, but back then at Universities there was a select few people were creating their own adventures on the earliest of computers. Only with the power of a 1MHz processor and a few kilobytes of memory and storage, these creative individuals were setting the path to computer role-playing games, and a sub-genre called Roguelike.
Roguelike origins comes from the game Rogue where you are an adventurer going through a randomly generated dungeon, inspired from Dungeons and Dragons, seeking riches while not getting killed by the inhabitants. You only have one chance, and if you fail, you start over. There was no fancy graphics, not even icons. Instead, the entire game was made with text characters.
This was an inspirational book as I want to dive into game development as a hobby. Luckily, I do not have to worry about limitations like the programmers had back then. I have a mass amount of tools at my disposal thanks to the internet; all they had was the ARPANET (the precursor to the Internet). Plus, we had a variety of computer languages like C++, Java, C#, and others; they only had Pascal, Fortran, and C plus they only had textbooks to learn this new science trade.