Roganic's AdventureRoganic's AdventureOur hero Roganic lives the magic world of Multia, which is inhabited by many strange and dangerous beasts. See what happens if he should chance to bump into one! Use the arrow buttons to move Roganic around the forest and see if you can find the castle! Make sure you can see the whole green game field; there's a text box at the bottom of the playing area.
Since JavaScript still doesn't allow sophisticated 3D graphics (not without using Microsoft ActiveX controls or Netscape Plug-ins), a two-dimensional fantasy roleplaying adventure game is the best we can do. These kinds of games were popular for over 10 years when computers first came out; many people getting into computers for the first time will never have seen this sort of game before, and the joy of exploration and discovery is just as great when it looks like this as it does in a first-person view.
This game uses very sophisticated techniques that only Internet Explorer supports; in particular, changing the background of a table cell--this is what allows us to scroll the map "beneath" the game character as he walks. Because we're allowed to have two bitmaps per table cell (one in the background, and one in the foreground), we don't have to build graphics that show the foreground pieces on every possible background. That would make for a lot of bitmaps! Transparent GIF images and a little playing with the HTML Document Object Model allow us to do some sophisticated graphics work that took a lot more work when games like this appeared on computers running DOS or the Mac operating system.