Line (patters)

A game about a line, written in a single line of BASIC code

Using only the space bar, guide the line to the gate on the other side of the screen avoiding collisions. You could imagine it's a sledge travelling downhill avoiding trees, viewed from above - if that helps.

Each level has more obstacles than the last, and at level 10 the gate gets narrower. If you beat level 20 and see a STOP statement then you have completed the game!

This work is free to download, but it remains protected by copyright, and I offer no licence to the user.

Credits:

I initially wrote a version of this game in about 1996, when I was digitising my old program cassettes. It started as an experiment to use ATTR collision detection for PLOTed coordinates, something which I had struggled to get working reliably in my childhood programs. My aim at the time had been to make a fun game with as small a listing as I could...

Back to the present day I was staggered to discover the incredible technical showcase that is Digital Prawn's One Liner Page. A seed was planted. I had to write a one liner game, just for the sheer challenge.

Owing to the clumsiness of editing large program lines directly on a Spectrum, I used BasinC to adapt my existing program, optimising the listing into a single line occupying a single screen of text during one very late night in July 2019.

The game I have made is in fact an approximate remake of a game (also called Line) that I remember from school, which ran on a black Research Machines Link 480Z, a computer so obscure that I could find no record of it at all until recently.