Phreak : Dev Notes 01

For a very long time now, I've had this dream of building an adventure game.

I cut my teeth on King's Quest, and Space Quest, and the LucasArts games, so the idea of contributing one of my own has always been appealling.

I wanted to make a call back to the BBS days; the principle character would be a poor little rich boy in a mall circa 93, assembling an acoustic coupler from scrap to make BBS connections.

I've had this rolling around in my brain for a very long time.

The problem is that I can't do the graphics I want the game to have. My ideal art style would have been Space Quest 4; that also takes place in a mall, and I love the idea of poking at hedonistic late stage capitalism before we all got to see what it became.

Recently, I decided to scrap graphics and just roll a text adventure game, and that's going well. I have an engine that works, however I have one small problem. I can't get Ansi graphics working, and that's a deal breaker.

Here's a test image I built in The Draw:

.. next to what the Textual interface renders out. Slight problem there.

The issue is that I made the rookie mistake of assuming the console would work the same way for everyone; it won't. Your terminal font among other things will cause oddbakk problems.

So, now I'm going to have to start over, and I'll likely use Godot. More to come.