I'm no artist and I can't be bothered to pay anyone for the level of detail I would need for the first option. This iteration is just for fun, not profit. So I have to go for the second option -- minimal graphics plus text. My intention was to go very, very, simplistic. Not quite Dwarf Fortress simplistic, but very nearly. I had it in my head to use a simple tile set, with symbols of some sort for game entities.
My problem, as always, is time. Between work, family, and other projects that have higher priority, I'm wasting too much time on the graphical side of this game idea. I want to get busy with the game itself. Since I'll be using a good deal of text anyway, why not just ditch Allegro and go for a pure text-based game? So that's exactly what I've decided to do. Dolce, however, is a neat little idea that I hope to come back to now and again when I have a lull. And at some point I will very much want to make a graphical version of this game if it turns out to be as fun as I hope. But for now, text it is.
One of my first problems to consider is colored text in the console. I want the game to run on Windows, Mac and Linux, so I want something that's portable and simple. That means ANSI escape codes. But the Windows command console doesn't support ANSI escape codes right out of the box. After a bit of digging around, I found a solution.
ansicon is a little console for Windows that can understand ANSI escape codes. And it's freely distributable so I can bundle it with my app and use it in place of the standard command prompt. Of course, I wouldn't want the user to have to open it and type a command to run my app. Luckily, any arguments passed to ansicon that it doesn't recognize are considered to be a program to execute and its arguments. So a one line batch file would do the trick:
ansicon MyApp
Another option would be to make a simple executable to launch ansicon. In D, it might look something like this:
int main(string[] args)
{
import std.process;
return system("bin\\ansicon.exe MyApp");
}
Notice how I've got the import statement inside the main function. That's a new feature that was added in the latest DMD release. It doesn't seem like a big deal, but I can't count how many times I've knocked up a quick D script to test out some idea only to realize that I forgot to import std.stdio at the top. If I'm only using a symbol in one function, then instead of scrolling back up and adding the import at the top, I can just add it in place and drive on.
There are other functions in std.process that can be used to execute processes in a cross-platform manner. Of course, before someone points it out, I do realize that the path I passed is not cross-platform because of the backslash. Calls to system on Windows will fail if the path contains a forward slash, so you'd have to do the right thing based on platform. But for this launcher, I don't need to be cross platform.
For those who don't like escaping special characters, there's one more D feature that can help: WYSIWYG strings.
// Using r""
string s = r"bin\ansicon MyApp";
// Using backticks (not single quotes)
s = `bin\ansicon MyApp`;
D also supports heredoc strings, which also do not require escapes.
So now I'm on the road to making a complex text-based game to prototype my idea and you know a little more about D's strings.
