Chapter 14. Legionnaire

In February of 1979, besotted with the success of Tanktics, I resolved to design a new game, a design that would take proper advantage of the capabilities of the Commodore PET computer. Tanktics, after all, had been designed to run on an IBM 1130 and was therefore clumsy to use on a personal computer. I wanted something that would really shine in the luxuriant environment of these powerful new personal computers.

I looked at a variety of possibilities: a Battle of the Bulge game, an Eastern Front game, and a Waterloo game. I toyed with designs for these, but nothing seemed to come out well. For three months I fiddled around to no avail. At last, frustrated with my lack of progress, I simply sat down and tossed together a hexgrid map display using the PET's graphics character set. You see, the PET did not offer a pixel-addressable display; it was pure alphanumeric. You had 24 rows with 40 characters on each row, and that was all. Graphics were built up from special "graphics characters" provided by the operating system: horizontal, vertical, and diagonal lines, dots, squares, stars, and so forth. I used the various line components to assemble a hexgrid map. Of course, each of the line segments filled an entire character space on the screen, so the only usable screen space was the empty character space inside each hex. This meant that I had about as much screen space devoted to hex edges as to hex content not an efficient use of precious screen space. I had a lot to learn back then.

With a map in place, it seemed right to put in some units. Obviously, my combat units would have to be displayed as single characters. The small size of the display limited the game to eight units for the player and eight for the computer. The player's units were marked as the numerals 1 through 8; the computer's were the same numerals in inverse video (black where white normally is and vice versa).

LESSON 29

Never build a technology and then go looking for a game to fit it.

Next, I slapped together a movement system using much the same sentence structure I used with Tanktics. To command units, the player simply pressed the key corresponding to his unit, and then gave it movement orders in the same 1 6 directional rose system that I had used in Tanktics. The player could enter multiple orders, delete some, and enter more, just like Tanktics. In other words, I simply threw together a screen-based version of the basic mechanics of Tanktics. All I had to do now was design a game to fit this nifty display system.