Shifting Mazes

Shifting Mazes is a QBasic game I wrote in high school. It is an RPG (role-playing game), more specifically a randomized dungeon explorer. It doesn't have proper graphics but is completely done using ASCII characters, in true DOS fashion, and it doesn't have a story either. Nevertheless, I find it to be very fun.

I wrote Shifting Mazes in high school, so don't take the quality of the code as being indicative of my programming abilities. Yes, it is probably not top-quality code.

I started making a sequel which was relatively close to completion, but I haven't worked on it for many years. If you want a copy of this incomplete, non-working sequel for some reason, you can request it by e-mail.

Download Shifting Mazes with source code

To play the game in Windows, extract the zip file and run the maze.exe file.

The manual can be read online here.

Old Instructions:

There are also these old instructions to use in DosBox under Linux or Windows, which was necessary before I compiled it to an exe using QB64 (I was never able to make an exe with the original QBasic, because the program was too big for Microsoft's QuickBasic compiler). If for some reason you want to see or debug the code, or if a bug is discovered in the QB64 exe that wasn't present in the original code and you need to run it with the original QBasic, these instructions should let you do that.

• Install dosbox
• Get the qbasic executable and put it in the same folder as the game (available from https://www.qbasic.net)
• Extract the game's files to a folder, say ~/dosprogs
• Run dosbox
• Enter the commands:

  mount c ~/dosprogs
  C:
  qbasic.exe /run maze.bas
              

You may use, distribute, etc. the code in any way you want, except you may not call it your own or copyright it yourself.