Originally Posted by QuikSand
So, my 18-19-20 year old self was into BASIC programming, using (among other things) my home Atari 800XL system where you could take out the game cartridge and insert a BASIC cartridge. I developed a series of games and so forth, no shock, and tried to dabble into "sims" to some degree.
I created a swords/fencing game - nothing really complicated, but the main engine was putting two swordfighters against one another, low-end graphics, on a two-dimensional forum, and let them hack at each other. It was basically derived from D&D style combat calculations, with some added variables for aggression, healing speed, and so forth. It turned out to be a reliable engine for a larger sim.
The first variation was to create an all-history swordsmen sim, where a giant tournament would feature everyone from Achilles (massive defensive ratings, natch) to Sir Gawaine to Raiko to Gilgamesh to Fafhrd and anyone else I could summon from mythology or literature. That was pretty fun, but it was a static game -- I'd just start it up, it would sim out the whole tournament style, and the only dynamic thing about it was a guy's injuries from one round would carry over, to varying degrees, to the next matchup. So, I enjoyed that for a while.
Later, I re-opened that game, and used the swordfight subroutine to create my first career style sim. It was a more structured "professional" style league, with a season, win/loss records, standings, and a championship tournament. In that game, I added some math for a "career arc" for each player, so his skills would develop (if he remained active) up to a certain age, and then start to decline. So, a given guy could compete at the top level for maybe 8 years, IIRC.
I still remember, some 30 years later, a South American competitor Juarez (each trime the game created a new player, I got a prompt to submit a regionally-appropriate name... I think this guy was from Argentina, drawn from a weighted list of national origins).
Juarez was good, but not great. If the contest was 16 competitors at any time, he was annually maybe the 3rd or 4th best among them. For some reason, he didn't suffer the same decline as most players in their early-mid 30s, and he stuck around later than nearly anyone else. At age 37 (I'm 100% sure that was the age, thirty real life years later) Juarez had his best season, entered the championship tournament as the #2 seed (good for him) and won the whole thing for maybe his first time. Than he retired on the spot.
Jeez, I created the damned sim myself, and knew every single detail of how it calculated each step along the way, and I was still all in for the narrative behind that. It was awesome.
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