Sick Meier Strikes The Earth

My first game is live!

Author

Tyler Barstow
March 24, 2023 • Est. Reading Time: 3 minutes

I made my first game last night and I’m freaking out that it’s actually, like, working lol. I entered a Game Jam that starts in April and I went through a tutorial last night on building your first ASCII game. I’ve been going upstream with reckless abandon lately in terms of the games I’ve been getting into, and ASCII felt like a great fit not because I’m trying to be a purist but because it lets me focus on the coding part rather than the “learning a new game engine” part. I started a Unity tutorial a couple weeks ago that I’m slowly chipping away at, but rather than waiting around for whenever I sort of understand what’s going on there, I decided to just start with what I know now.

Anyway, I spent all morning getting it live on Vercel so that you can play it yourself. Vercel-ing isn’t something that should take all morning to do, per se, but this is only the second time I’ve used it and learning how to deploy to Github and then to Vercel from the command line is still a work in progress for me. Shout out to the homie ChatGPT for the mega hookup there, I can only imagine that it’s tagged me in its system as that doofus in Austin who asks the same 3 questions every 8 days.

The game is wild simple:

  1. You move using up down left or right keys on your keyboard. If you don’t have those, you can’t play right now RIP 😭 

  2. You are the number (it should start at 3). Your number is both you on the map and the count of your current hit points. It’ll go down by 1 each time you take damage from an enemy and you lose if you get to 0.

  3. The enemies are all visualized as the letter “e”

  4. Periods are floor tiles and hashmarks are columns. You can’t walk through columns.

  5. Enemies can technically kill each other, so if you line them up right you might see that happen.

  6. Attacks are made by moves

  7. Enemies have 1 HP, you have 3 HP

  8. Sometimes enemies are spawned surrounded by columns so if you get to a point where there’s 1 enemy left and you can’t reach them, just hit Ctr R and it will restart the game.

OK, LET’S DO IT