I have offloaded one more project, a bit more adventurous than the last two. If nothing else, the logic is mine save the algo's (so I am playing the rôle of Mark Barnes).
Enjoy Cellular Automata, or "Cave" for short. If you do C# and don't mind the /unsafe tag.
In 1982, BYTE was running a competition for games. We've met the "winner" which nobody remembers. Enjoying a better reputation today is the number-five loser: Gordon Mills' Ringquest - at least, for the Redditors. This game is available in the MicroM8 emulator. All for the higher-end Apples, like 48k RAM.
This game is a fanfic / alternate of Lord of the Rings where/when the bulk of the Fellowship has failed in the depths of Moria. Now the Balrog owns Sauron's Ring. Your job is to get down there and pry the Ring off him/it, before everybody else is screwed. Treasure can be found. Mills switches-up the usual Nethack / Rogue conventions such that you can use the treasure to bribe encounters out of a fight; except for the Balrog itself of course. Your aim is progress toward the MacGuffin, not to gain loot.
The comp winner was in Forth. The fourth-with-a-u also-ran was in Basic... mostly. To input this thing into your machine required manual entry of many, many hexadecimal bytes: this is how most the data were separate from the program, which prog took up 6k RAM. I suppose the step after that would have been to compress the data which at least might have cut the manual entry (but could you do that in 8-bit?). The map, at least, was procedurally-generated.
I feel like the author should instead have saved it to cassette and sold it. This was wasted on BYTE. Maybe the use of the Tolkien Estate's property was the problem; Beyond Zork solved this with the "Coconut of Quendor".
