General Budda's Labyrinth

LEGACY DOS VERSION BELOW

for DOS (or DOS emulation)

Read reviews at ClassicDOSGames.com

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This was my first attempt at a large-scale “find your way through the maze” style game, written in Microsoft QuickBASIC 4.5.

At the time, I was still learning many of the fundamentals of game development. Even basic tasks felt like major challenges—like building images as GIF files and converting them into a format I could load into memory, or figuring out how to implement random-access binary files for level data. Every step was a discovery.

The game was developed on a 386SX PC—my first personal computer that wasn’t a Commodore 64. That transition alone felt like stepping into a new world of possibilities.

Inspired by the shareware distribution model popularized by companies like Apogee, I structured the game into three episodes, hoping to capture that same sense of progression and anticipation.

“Budda” was actually a nickname given to me by some of my nieces and nephews at the time, and it eventually became part of the game’s identity.

I was still experimenting with sprite collision detection, so the gameplay can be fairly unforgiving—narrow corridors, tight timing, and little room for error. In hindsight, it may even feel a bit harsh, but that was part of the learning process.

Interestingly, one of the early bugs ended up becoming something memorable. The roaming orbs occasionally eroded parts of the maze walls. While this was originally unintended, I liked the visual effect so much that I left it in as a feature.

Looking back, this project wasn’t just a game—it was a hands-on education in programming, design, and creative problem-solving during the earliest stages of my development journey.