I wasn’t sure whether I should include today’s game as a home brew as it’s creator, Gemini (Kris Asick), has produced commercial games. From the file date it was made sometime in November 2017. He made it using QBasic during a live stream, which is certainly interesting, unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a recording to watch now.
QB Debugger Heroes is a fairly simple Robotron 2084 clone using text mode for graphics and lacking any sound effects. This is relatively common for games implemented using gwbasic or Qbasic languages as it makes development much faster, and whilst there are graphics commands they don’t generally perform well so aren’t suited for action games. Although it is technically possible. Whilst it’s just textmode style graphics, they are nice to look at and includes some basic animation that looks quite nice.
The game controls requires the numpad on your keyboard, so you won’t be playing on a laptop. It works kinda like the twin stick design of the arcade game, with two clusters of keys, one for movement and the other for directing your fire. However unlike a real joystick each keypress changes your movement and gun fire, but you continue moving and firing in that direction until you press a key to change it. This is partly because of limitations within Qbasic when reading input from the keyboard.
For best results I suggest using a modern machine with Dosbox to run it, as you’ll be able to adjust the speed as needed. 30,000 cycles was suggested and is about right for a faster more challenging play experience. If you’re playing on real hardware you’ll need a Pentium era machine to get a decent challenge. Older 286 and 386 machines will work, but it runs slower and will be significantly easier.
The game play has the main elements of Robotron, but is simplified and has some elements removed. Like the arcade game, enemies spawn in continuously (in short bursts) and you finish a wave when your destroy a set number of them. However it appears there are fewer enemy types and there aren’t any humans to rescue. This was to be expected as it was developed in a relatively small time frame, and additions such as those would have degraded the game speed. Difficulty ramps up with each wave mostly just by number of enemies present.
Obviously QB Debugger Heroes isn’t anything special as far as Robotron clones go, but it is a good example of what can be done fairly quickly with a language like QBasic. Gemini has managed to create a reasonably faithful Robotron clone that is polished in 6 hours, which in my book is pretty darn impressive. You can find a download for it on his website.
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