Storytelling Through Time: A Unique Puzzle

I love DOS games, even on screens with CGA palettes.
Do they feel authentic? Those memories of puzzles, arcades, and adventures with streamlined gameplay bring a sense of accomplishment and endless exploration. The high scores table we used to climb, the leaderboard stored in superficially encrypted files right next to game.exe. Yes, I couldn’t share my progress in the modern sense, only by showing my screen to someone in the room to engage them.

Back then, I played games with a growing curiosity about how to create my own and what it takes to make a good one, from inception to completion. Without thinking about architecture, concept, sprint planning, milestones, deadlines, or retrospectives—who needed that in school? No version control either; I backed up my work on a floppy disk.

A shiny toy inevitably deserves to be disassembled and studied. What was a typical executable made of? I delved into that out of curiosity to understand the game internals.

The game consists of smiley characters, alphanumeric characters, and a few other symbols that may appear unreadable at first. This is possibly a traditional approach to writing applications, requiring only the ability to grasp and 'understand the pattern.' Of course, it shouldn't take more than a few minutes to get the hang of it.

Fortunately, the right person came along at the right time and brought me a book with Basic and Fortran educational materials, advising me not to bother with smiley characters.

The idea behind my very first application was quite straightforward: to read the input and respond with the price of cheese based on its code and quantity. It was like a second lesson, with 'if-then-else' statements explained in a nutshell. It wasn't quite a game yet, nor was it an experiment, but the entire learning process was self-gamified and turned out to be a long journey.

And that journey eventually led me to my profession.

Rewind Time To Now

App Store boasts countless apps for nearly every purpose.

But there's always room for something new...