I watch an anxious, yet enthusiastic Lance E. McDonald monitor expo-goers as they play Black Annex, his Syndicate-inspired and retro-styled strategy game. He keeps an eye out for bugs and other oddities, some the average player may never notice, but for a creator, they are unsightly blemishes, bordering on miniature disasters.
Black Annex Gameplay Walkthrough - Indie DB
Last Monday we profile Lance E. McDonald, the creator of Black Annex, the game being built entirely from QBASIC. Many of you expressed interest in actually seeing the game in action and now Lance has delivered, streaming a 40 minute walkthrough of some of Black Annex's gameplay.
20 years ago Lance E. McDonald rescued an Amstrad CPC-464 at a market in country Victoria. He was six years old. Now, married with two young children, Lance is on a mission. He want to make a video game like the ones he used to play, using the tools he first learned when he was in primary school. The video game is called Black Annex and he's building it by himself. He's building it using QBASIC. Lance E. McDonald is batshit insane.
If you liked the first Syndicate, you may have been less than satisfied with the first-person shooter version that came out last year. Perhaps you'd like a version that's a bit truer to the original, like Firaxis' take on XCOM?
Black Annex is an action strategy game about corporate sabotage and infiltration. You manage your company's resources, you deploy agents to murder, kidnap and obliterate your enemies. This in itself is a unique enough proposition to warrant some sort of headline on Kotaku, but you haven't heard the best part: the entire game has been built, from the ground up, in QBASIC.
