Hey guys, I'm pretty new to this whole scene. I just started learning Basic from a TUT I found, and thought it might be fun.

So, since I suck at this, I thought of making a text based rpg style game. The main plot is that you are a mercenary/assassin payed by the government to exterminate the leaders of a drug cartel that has created a new drug that would be the new 'crack'. That's basically it in a nutshell.

This is going to be very hard for me since I'm just beginning to learn stuff. However, hopefully you guys can help me out and stuff.

Hopefully in the future, I can incorporate animated scenes and stuff where you control the gun or something.

I think I speak for everyone when I say we're always glad to see a new member join the community, what with it being in the deteriorated state that it is (ticalc hasn't been updated in a month!)

No offense to any TIcalc mods, of course.

It just seems to me that the Ti Calculator community experience a "golden age" between about 1999 and 2006, and hasn't yet picked back up to where it once was. Maybe once more is learned about TI's most recent calculators, more interesting things will begin to happen again.

Of course, I think many of the most interesting developments were made "after the fall." There are still a few very active developers working on some very important projects. (Off the top of my head I can think of Spenser's Zelda, TIfreak's Pokemon Purple, and BrandonW's work on solving the deepest mysteries of the OS and the architecture.)

At this specifically, controlling the weapon is going to be incredibly hard with BASIC. Since you can't utilize sprites without the use of a Flash or ASM library, which does take a bit to memorize and since they're is never just one library, you'll only appeal to a small audience.


It would make better sense to control the cross-hairs since the size of the sprite is small enough to have the BASIC program redraw the erased pixels, then there's another way out of coding that into your program by using the 'Input' command. But, like you said, in the future.


You may want to skip on reading this, since it has NOTHING to do with you :)
I've been out of TI programming for several years now, so I'll be slow on some issues but I will still help where I still can - games never were 'me,' I stuck with managers and what-not.

As you program don't be afraid to form a method to your madness. I always used the same GUI for my managers - though I only officially released one - it worked very well with keeping the coding down helped me focus on topic (manage) points rather than appearance. And the general appearance eliminated the need to learn multiple interfaces, just menu's. Not to mention I started coding my programs to edit it's sister programs variable strings. But this is way off topic. I'm just gloating about my glory days


Onto the your program!!!
Sounds like a good concept. Do have a method of selecting options yet? Menu Based or Text Input?

Also, from exp. I wouldn't jump right into programming with this idea unless you don't get discouraged easily. Start with some simple control programs, like, controlling a pixel around the screen, using labels & goTo's, While statements, and If-Then-Else statements, and other small things. Few of these may seem totally askew to your RPG, but writing small programs and offering them up for optimization by us here at Cemetech or anywhere else can lead to a more successful program later on.

Oh, and welcome

Welcome to the scene, and welcome to Cemetech. I agree that you're definitely best off starting with some relatively easy programs to get the feel of the language, then move onto something like this project. That will give you a good way to understand what the language is and is not capable of so you're not disappointed once you start your game.

After reading tifreak's tutorial, I think I pretty much have most of the basic stuff down.

As to my program, so far I only have a little of it done. I started it last night and I don't really have much done. For the options and stuff, I'm using menus( because that's easy for me.

To some18, I was thinking about just using crosshairs and stuff like that, but as I said earlier, I have no clue, yet, how to do that ! Hopefullly as I learn more of Basic I'll understand how.

I see that most of you are saying I should get some practice done and stuff, and I guess I really should, but, I'm the kind of person that wants to do the big stuff first (even though my game is going to be text based, not like animated or something).

Back to my program. It's called Drug Rush: Assassin in the Midst. I've drawn a pic for the opening slide or whatever it's called, and used the pause function to go an explanation of the game, and then another pause to a menu where you pick an assassin. I have: Ivanov, Rodriquez, and Smith. Once you pick one of them, you go to a new program corrisponding to the agent you pick. You pick the weapon that you will use for the rest of the game. They each have different weapons that you can use, but they all have the option of fists. That's as far as I am though.

But, how would I be able to do the crosshair thing? Can anybody tell me a way to do something similar to that?

Thanks guys!

Ugh. The grater problem is, how would you draw what you are shooting? (draw to the screen, that is.)

See, basic is incredibly slow for stuff like that. (I just wrote a set of programs to scale and rotate sprites, and if used in a game, it would have to run at like one tenth of one frame per second.)
The only real way to do graphics in basic fast enough for use in a game would be to use text based graphics, by doing Output( commands to the homescreen. Various assembly libs like xLib and Omnicalc can be used to draw sprites to the graphscreen, but for something like this, where it would only be a minor feature to make the game more exciting, text based graphics should work fine.

This actually sounds like a nice idea. It reminds me of the original Oregon Trail, where the entire game was made up of menus and still pictures made of different colored blocks (talking about an Apple II here), with the only realtime gameplay being the simple "hunting" stages which involved simple, top down, 2d, monochrome minigame of little dude shooting pixels at other little blobs.

Even though it was interfacially simple (totally a word!), it was a surprisingly fun and very popular game, even years later.

So you think my game has potential even though it's text based, and I only started to learn Basic?

Of course, and even if it's not the best game ever, you'll be able to continually improve it as yu build your skills. Check your other topic for thoughts on the crosshair issue.

if you're really want to implement a graphscreen crosshair without ASM you could save a crosshair screen to a pic, and then just continually recall that pic... of course that means the crosshair isnt moving, but oh well...

hmm, you could also use Codex's sprite feature to do something fancier like a relatively rich background and a moving crosshair...

anyways I have to agree with Kerm; start out with something simple and just build up your skills. Post them up here, and we'll certainly help you improve them.