I made a real MS-DOS game.
A lot of games these days take inspiration from retro titles, from mechanics to presentation. This has led to some fantastic releases over the past decade or so, but for LD50 I wanted to take it a step further.
Supplicant is a text adventure inspired by games from the 70's and 80's like Zork. What sets it apart from simply being inspired by these old games is that it was natively developed for MS-DOS using a real 33Mhz 486DX PC and tools from the 90's, Borland Turbo C++ in this case. My thinking is that one day game dev for native retro platforms might die, and the old hardware I used to make the game will certainly die, but I can carry the torch for one more jam.
It was a lot of fun putting this together. I'm not sure if there's much of a market for text adventures anymore, but I might continue to tinker with this in the future to create something a bit larger with more involved puzzles.
If you haven't tried it, head on over to the game page and let me know what you think! Everything's all set up for you to be able to run the game in DOSBox, but you could also take the game exe, transfer it to a real MS-DOS machine, and then run it there.