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During the last month before the deadline of the One Page Dungeon Contest 2014, I somehow caught wind of another contest being held by Richard Garriott. He has been working on the Shroud of the Avatar since its successful kickstarter a couple of years ago. The game was recently previewed at the E3 convention in Los Angeles (See Venture Beat E3 Lord British)

Being that I was in the middle of running the #1pdc I could not imagine I would have any time to work on anything else. But then...

Richard Garriott's contest was to take the BASIC source code of a game he wrote in 1978 and to port it to run in a modern browser.

Wow.

That got me to thinking back to being a young kid. My mother bought me a VIC 20 in 1981, and I still remember typing in BASIC code to make a space invaders like game. Later on, I won some programming competitions in high school.

I spent many hours playing Ultima III one summer. Must have been around 1984, which is around the same time I started playing Dungeons & Dragons.

As long time readers of the blog may already know, I do quite a bit of web "stuff" in javascript to get it to run in a browser. I wrote a Labyrinth Lord Tunnel of Adventure. I wrote a page to display Force Directed Graphs of the Caves of Chaos, and I put together an animated astrolab for Bruce Heard's new Soltan Ephemeris.

So, I figured I would try to work on a port of Richard Garriott's DND1 program. It was rough. I basically only had 3 Sunday afternoons to work on the project. Quite a few folks entered the contest and talked about their projects over at the Shroud of the Avatar forums. As time progressed, I felt like I was getting left behind as I couldn't put much work into the code during the work week. So every weekend I would see some amazing program that would take me days to catch up to.

So, I trudged along, coding when I could. I aimed for converting the BASIC code into pure javascript without any libraries. You don't find many people who code that way these days, everyone uses the jQuery library to save time. I submitted my code before the deadline and then sort of forgot about it as I moved on to other projects (mainly coordinating voting and prizes for the #1pdc 2014).

Until yesterday, when I found out that my code was selected as the winner for the web port version of the contest (See Lord British Presents yon Winners of the DND1 Contest).

I don't know the minds of Lord British or the judges of the contest, but if I had to guess, I think my rather plain looking entry might have beat out the other more impressive looking entries because I spent time trying to get it to work right on the iPhone4 and 5, as well as the Galaxy S3 and S4. Since it was really plain, I just had to resize it correctly to get it to fit in the smaller real estate of the phone screen.

The original contest rules stated
No plug-in Browser Version Entries earn bonus points if run on: 4 major browsers (Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari), 3 operating systems (windows, mac & linux), and 2 mobile platforms (iOs & Android).

I think some of the other entries might have missed that criteria.

You can play the version I submitted on a web browser by going to Kirith DND1. You have to enter your character names as SHAVS
Also, do not ask for instructions.

It is a great honour to win. This is the second time I have had a chance to interact with someone who made something I cherished as a kid. Growing up in a rural area, games like Ultima III were a god send. Much like when I got the chance to interview Frank Mentzer who created the Red Box that was my introduction to D&D, there is just something amazing about getting the chance to interact with Richard Garriott who created one of the first RPG video games I ever played back in the summer of 1984.