Dark Vesta - text based mini game for Linux

[Jonax]

Fellow independents,

I'm pleased to present a text based mini game for 64-bit Linux.

The Dark Vesta. The events are taking place on the same Vesta station as the previous Vesta Forever game. But the location is really not important. This time you got to help the less capable electronic supervisor 2CPU to restore the main power on the base.
The challenge is to crack a not so secret code and clear 12 squares. I can think of a few possible paths to do that. Including brute force, but brute force is not satisfactory. Better to decipher the code.

From a game programming view this is pretty simple. Nothing moves. No timer. No sound. Just a few forms. For nostalgical reasons the interface is limited to VGA resolution and four colors. ( 16, if you solve the code ).
The game is supposed to scale well on high-resolution monitors. One unsolved programming problem is the behaviour of different forms. If you move them around mid game the old forms still appears on the same spot. I hope you won't get too bothered by that. An other problem was updating the game-state between different forms. Though I had some use of placing super-global constants and variables in a separat unit I also had to resort to some dirty tricks.

The game interface depends on keyboard. Though mouse can be used at a few places.

No doubt I will want/need to update the game after feedback. The first version got the name Vesta2024A. Hope to be finished before the whole alphabet is used.

The text based game is in English but no special word trickery is used. I myself am not a native English speaker. I hope you all will enjoy the challenge to solve the game.

Here is the link to the download site

https://www.jonax.se/linux/darkvesta.php

Enjoy the Dark Vesta game. Feedback is appreciated!

Below a screenshot.

[SilverWarior]

One unsolved programming problem is the behaviour of different forms. If you move them around mid game the old forms still appears on the same spot. I hope you won't get too bothered by that. An other problem was updating the game-state between different forms. Though I had some use of placing super-global constants and variables in a separat unit I also had to resort to some dirty tricks.

Wait you used different forms for different states of the game? That must have been a nightmare to get it to work properly. You should have opted out of using multiple frames instead of multiple forms. Frames act similar as forms but they are always shown within the context of another form. This would have avoided you the problem of being able to see or even switch to one of the previous forms.

As for updating game state between different forms you should have decoupled your game state from the forms entirely and then just let the forms to check the game state when being shown.
You may want to check some articles of how state-machines work.

[Jonax]

Indeed it was starting to get messy. Thanks for the suggestions. I think I have to start looking into that.

[SilverWarior]

Another thing that you could do is make one form with a fixed layout with larger text box at the top (perhaps with a static image for background) and four or so text buttons at the bottom.
And then you are only changing the text of the mai9n text box and button. Granted you will have to implement proper state machine so your program will know what action needs to be fired when certain button is pressed at certain time.