Recently I've been playing Last Call BBS, a collection of interesting puzzle games and ode to the 1990s era of computing and dial-up BBS culture by Zachtronics. In July 2022 the developers released a sort of in-game devkit, Axiom QuickServe, which allows the community to write and share applications that will then show up as dial-up servers within the game world (with limited greyscale text and ANSI-art-style interfaces).
This caught my imagination so I spent a little time writing a poker solitaire game-- basically a port of a simple game I wrote for PICO-8.
While playing within Last Call BBS is how this was intended, it looks like someone's now emulated that game's 'BBS dev environment', so you can play this game's .js file directly on the web at this link: https://stellartux.github.io/netronics-connect-online/?https://raw.githubusercontent.com/icegoat9/lastcallbbs/main/emptysaloon.js
Within Last Call BBS, open "Netronics Connect!" and go to "Add New Servers...". That should give you a window that lets you "Open Folder" to open the local servers folder on your computer. Download emptysaloon.js from this github repo and move it to that folder. Restart Netronics Connect! and you should see the option to 'Dial Empty Saloon'.
It may be easiest to learn by playing, but:
- Place cards in a 5x5 grid to create 12 poker hands (horizontal, vertical, and the two main diagonals).
- Score points depending on the hands.
- Score a large bonus if you have a valid poker hand (pairs or better) in all twelve directions, which is not easy!
- July 21 Got a playable game working, let's call it "v0.7", uploaded to github
- July 26 Swap in newly available card characters ♣ ♦ ♠
ToDo:
- Get feedback from people who play it
- Add 'Top 10 high scores' (and persist)?
- Add a 'hard mode' (must score hands in all 12 directions)
- I have almost zero Javascript experience, so I'm sure I'm missing standard engineering patterns or existing library functions-- this was just a fast and fun project banged out in several hours.
- The typical caveat about running scripts downloaded from strangers on the internet... I don't know what sort of sandboxing Last Call BBS includes, but fortunately you can just look at this source and see it is just a local game, nothing that talks to local files or the network.