Hamurabi in ABAP

Dear Community, since I am constantly helping trainees and students with their entry into ABAP, I’m always looking for interesting topics – because exciting topics always motivate. So I recently discovered a small game called Hamurabi in a very old book on the BASIC programming language from the 1970s. The author is David H. Ahl. Wikipedia summarized the game perfectly: “Hamurabi is a text-based strategy video game of land and resource management.“. You can read more about the gameplay on Wikipedia.

Since it’s a game and not very big but at the same time interesting because of its topic, it’s well suited for working with trainees and students. So I wrote a small proof-of-concept implementation in ABAP. For simplicity, I used a very simple implementation with WRITE to design the user interface. It’s still under development, not all game logic is included and it consists of just one report. You can check the source code on GitHub (no abapGit this time, sorry). Here are a few impressions.

start screen

rule wisely

By the way, I experienced some surprises while reading the BASIC source code. I last worked with BASIC about 25 years ago. Back then with QBasic, if I remember correctly. While reading the spaghetti code, I realized how complicated a source code from another time can be. In comparison It’s impressive to see what options, tools and design principles we have today. Nevertheless, all the effort remains.

If you want to try out the game quickly, there is an online version on itch.io, written in Adventuron.

By the way, I’ve read a nice quote on David H. Ahl’s homepage: “The circles around you can include or exclude ideas, people, and events. Draw large circles.” The search for new ideas is always worth it. Sometimes you find a nice quote 😉

Best regards and please stay healthy

Michael