This month's GDR challenge was to write a fun game that would fit within 80 columns and 24 lines in terms of code. Well, over the first half of this month I have done just that. 80x24 (June 2008) is my entry into the challenge. It's a very simplistic game, but I was surprised at how difficult it was to fit all of such a simple game into such tiny constraints!

The entirety of writing the game probably didn't take over three day's worth of time. A lot of that was spent optimizing code so that it would fit in a tiny space. That is, renaming variables to single characters, etc. It's amazing the ways in which you can whittle code down to such basic elements, or use tricks to save yourself some space. For instance, C's "evaluation ? a : b" construct saved me a bunch in coding space time and time again. My biggest accomplishment, though, was taking two fairly similar but different enough functions and munging them into a single function that took some arguments to dictate how those differences could be compensated for.