Show HN: "Santa Paravia En Fiumaccio" in WebAssembly

2 points by MrGilbert 4 hours ago

Hey folks! Recently, I had some spare evenings, and ended up digging into text-based resource management games from the 60's and 70's. I stumbled across 'Santa Paravia en Fiumaccio', which is a resource management game originally written in 1978 by George Blank, and published in the December 1978 issue of SoftSide magazine for the TRS-80 [1].

In 2003, Thomas Knox created a C version of this game, on which my conversion is based on. I rewrote the game in C# and wrote a (somehow long) blog post about it [2]. The game is available on GitHub under the original license (GPL 2), and I went a bit further and packaged it up in a way that it is playable in WebAssembly in the browser (although it loads roughly 8 MB in data).

Some issues:

- The map was not implemented in the C port from 2003. I skipped this part, but might add it later down the road. It is quite crucial, as the map provides you the information if your land/serfs ration is correct, and also if your land is adequately defended.

- The error handling leaves much to be desired, and the website needs a reload after the game ends. Generally speaking - if something feels off, just reload the page. If you would like to report issues, I'd like to hear from you in the comments or on GitHub [3]. :)

Besides that: My goal was to have some fun, finish a project and maybe the more approachable translation to C# means that someone feels inspired to pick up the original game and expand on it. I'd be really happy about that!

[1]: https://archive.org/details/softside-magazine-03 [2]: https://g5t.de/articles/20250709-santa-paravia/ [3]: https://github.com/DanielGilbert/Paravia/issues