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You play Chauncey, one of King Winthrop the Good’s humble servants. During a meal at which you are serving food, the king begins choking on a bit of turkey.
The other people at the table are so engrossed in one of Kronus Maelor (“the Evil High Chancellor”)’s stories, that they don’t notice the king’s predicament. But you, realizing the magnitude of the situation, perform a royal Heimlich maneuver on his highness, saving his life.
Although Maelor wishes you imprisoned for attacking the king, King Winthrop has a better grasp on the situation and rewards your valor by knighting you “Sir Chauncey” and giving you a small tract of land known as the Shimto Plains.
While vast tracts of land are nice, these particular tracts of land are infested with “The Horde”. Luckily, as part of your reward for saving his life, the good king has given you his mighty hordling-crushing sword, Grimthwacker with which to thwart the advance of the foul beasts.
CONTROLS
1-9 Move
5 – Place/improve fence ($1), more expensive fence can kill monsters.
c – Place cow ($20)
t – Wait for next season/horde to come
GOAL
Your goal is to reach 2000$ to pay tax to the Evil High Chancellor. At the beginning of each season you get $10 per cow. You lose when you are out of money.
The game is quite fun and the goal is reachable :)
Horde, by Jakub Debski, is a minimalistic program with code approaching 2K in size and is based on the 1994 video game “The Horde” by Toys for Bob.
April 3rd, 2009 - 11:59 am
Whenever the author of a program includes a readme file I use that instead of writing my own description, but I just wanted to add my own thoughts on how awesome this game is, if I didn’t illustrate that idea enough with the illustrations. I loved the original game, its juxtaposition of strategy planning with “arcade” action, tho it never was very popular. So when I saw this one I wondered how he could cram the Horde into such a small code base. How that I’ve seen it, I still wonder.
The choice to make the strategy planning and the action elements essentially simultaneous with timed waves succeeded in making a game that kept the feel of the original while reducing the code base, as well as possibly making a better game than the original. Occasionally if a hordling was up against a wall I knew would win out I would often just let him go at it and start my next strategy portion.
I think the addition of another K of code to clean up the presentation wouldn’t be amiss, but the game play is solid. And who here really cares about presentation?
April 6th, 2009 - 11:56 am
Try the Settlement from http://alamak0ta.republika.pl
April 7th, 2009 - 2:16 am
The game is about 2kb because I wanted to make a next 1KB entry for the 1KBRL challenge, however I had no time to compress it more. I’m glad you like it :-)