The adventure (and curse) begins!

So I’ve decided to participate in the DOS Games Jam. The idea is not clear yet, but it will be a simulation game about Mechs.

And of course I’ve started right from the beginning, with the most yak-shaving of tasks, which is the actual game configuration screen!

Given that my engine of choice for the game is Unity, it obviously comes without the required curses library (which by the way was never a thing on DOS, people were hardcore back in the day!) so I’ve decided to build my own, and it’s obviously called “UniCurses”.

After a few hours of tinkering, this is how it looks like:

The technique itself is nothing revolutionary, I’ve just taken the “standard” IBM font (VGA 9x16) from “THE OLDSCHOOL PC FONT RESOURCE”, a really fantastic site about fonts used in the old days, and imported it into Unity using TextMesh Pro (I’ve tried with the default font for that pixelated look, but it lacks fractional font size which is required to make it look like I want. It also looked really bad). My instinct was using RASTER fonts for this, but it looks like SDFAA_HINTED looks much better at higher resolutions, so I’m going with that.

Besides all the font tinkering I’ve made my code aware of CGA colors and I’m only using those for my text everywhere.

I’m also faking a lot of things, like shadows (if you look closely, you’ll see how there is a shadow on top of another, making the intersecting shadow darker, or how the shadowed colors are not really part of the valid CGA colors), but I’m not going to bother much with this, as I’ve spent enough time for something that is actually not a real part of the game 😁.

In any case, I’m not going to spend much more on this, as it already does most of what I need: I can create random labels of text, buttons and “windows” which hold any other UniCurses element.

The final touch I’m working on is keyboard navigation for that 100% authentic-fake feeling.

I’m hoping this is the first on a list of interesting blogs about my jam entry, but even if there are no more, I hope you’ve enjoyed this one!