It is a roleplaying game made in excel.
March 26, 2013 12:35 PM Subscribe
Arena.Xlsm is the fever dream of a Canadian Chartered Accountant with a love of roleplaying games (Hat tip to Special K over at mefightclub!)
Well, any time I kill a squirrel or bunny or whatever I get a runtime error, but I love the idea of this more than I can possibly describe.
posted by prize bull octorok at 12:48 PM on March 26, 2013
posted by prize bull octorok at 12:48 PM on March 26, 2013
Doing this in excel is like building a ship in a bottle or running a marathon backwards. No justification is required for choosing to operate under ridiculous constraints. People are awesome.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 12:49 PM on March 26, 2013 [17 favorites]
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 12:49 PM on March 26, 2013 [17 favorites]
I'm waiting for an implementation of Word contained entirely within Excel.
posted by Rock Steady at 12:50 PM on March 26, 2013 [2 favorites]
posted by Rock Steady at 12:50 PM on March 26, 2013 [2 favorites]
My MS Office instructor says he's doing way too much with Excel. He need to convert this to Access.
posted by charred husk at 12:52 PM on March 26, 2013 [1 favorite]
posted by charred husk at 12:52 PM on March 26, 2013 [1 favorite]
My MS Office instructor says he's doing way too much with Excel. He need to convert this to Access.
posted by charred husk
Eponysterical
posted by trunk muffins at 12:54 PM on March 26, 2013 [2 favorites]
posted by charred husk
Eponysterical
posted by trunk muffins at 12:54 PM on March 26, 2013 [2 favorites]
oh man........ I want to download this. So bad. But my productive is already crap as it is.
posted by oddman at 1:00 PM on March 26, 2013
posted by oddman at 1:00 PM on March 26, 2013
No justification is required for choosing to operate under ridiculous constraints.
It's so you can play games at work without anyone noticing.
I mean, that's the whole reason I learned VBA during my internship.
posted by backseatpilot at 1:10 PM on March 26, 2013
It's so you can play games at work without anyone noticing.
I mean, that's the whole reason I learned VBA during my internship.
posted by backseatpilot at 1:10 PM on March 26, 2013
As it happens I'm playing a game in SPSS right now. It's called "why does this macro take two goddamn hours to run, I could do this faster with a Curta"
posted by theodolite at 1:20 PM on March 26, 2013 [9 favorites]
posted by theodolite at 1:20 PM on March 26, 2013 [9 favorites]
backseatpilot: It's so you can play games at work without anyone noticing.
He really should offer a black & white, no graphics version. It would be perfect for that.
posted by Rock Steady at 1:33 PM on March 26, 2013
He really should offer a black & white, no graphics version. It would be perfect for that.
posted by Rock Steady at 1:33 PM on March 26, 2013
This is a cool project, although it continues to make me sad that "role-playing game" has come to mean "elaborate fantasy combat simulation."
posted by JHarris at 1:34 PM on March 26, 2013 [8 favorites]
posted by JHarris at 1:34 PM on March 26, 2013 [8 favorites]
I once built an interactive/playable Monte Hall simulation in Excel -- clickable doors, goats and cars behind 'em, buttons to reset or continue gameplay (it also tracked how you were doing with whatever strategy you were using). It's a simple game, but implementing this with only minimal VB was not trivial.
Having done that helps me appreciate this.
posted by weston at 1:36 PM on March 26, 2013
Having done that helps me appreciate this.
posted by weston at 1:36 PM on March 26, 2013
As it happens I'm playing a game in SPSS right now. It's called "why does this macro take two goddamn hours to run, I could do this faster with a Curta"
I'm so jealous. I play that one, too, but I've only unlocked the abacus.
posted by Gorgik at 1:42 PM on March 26, 2013 [3 favorites]
I'm so jealous. I play that one, too, but I've only unlocked the abacus.
posted by Gorgik at 1:42 PM on March 26, 2013 [3 favorites]
If BASIC mutilates the mind, I wonder what Djikstra would make of this...
posted by kjs3 at 1:52 PM on March 26, 2013
posted by kjs3 at 1:52 PM on March 26, 2013
Dijkstra didn't like BASIC because the BASIC of his time had no procedures, for the most part only had GOTO for logic flow, single letter variable names, and many other horrible things.
I've seen a lot of godawful VBA code in my time, but it's certainly possible and not difficult to write reasonably structured, readable code in this language.
posted by zixyer at 2:01 PM on March 26, 2013 [2 favorites]
I've seen a lot of godawful VBA code in my time, but it's certainly possible and not difficult to write reasonably structured, readable code in this language.
posted by zixyer at 2:01 PM on March 26, 2013 [2 favorites]
I'm sure it was posted here in the mists of time, but a Japanese Excel Nerd (in a positive way) wrote a stack of arcade ports in Excel as well, using tiny cells as pixels, which is both genius and overthinking a grid of beans. There's a bunch of early namco games in there, as well as a 3d engine written in Excel and VBA.
No, they do not run in Google Docs.
posted by davemee at 2:57 PM on March 26, 2013 [4 favorites]
No, they do not run in Google Docs.
posted by davemee at 2:57 PM on March 26, 2013 [4 favorites]
It's fun to charter an accountant,
And sail the wide accountancy
To find, explore, the funds off-shore,
And skirt the shoals of bankruptcy
It can be manly in assurance
We'll up your premiums semi-annually!
It's all tax-deductible,
We're fairly incorruptible,
We're sailing on the wide accountancy!
posted by Herodios at 3:21 PM on March 26, 2013 [5 favorites]
And sail the wide accountancy
To find, explore, the funds off-shore,
And skirt the shoals of bankruptcy
It can be manly in assurance
We'll up your premiums semi-annually!
It's all tax-deductible,
We're fairly incorruptible,
We're sailing on the wide accountancy!
posted by Herodios at 3:21 PM on March 26, 2013 [5 favorites]
This is awesome... those Excel skills will do him well when he finishes the MBA. He should send the sheet along with his resume when he applies for jobs; some (ok most) people will think it's really dorky but I think everyone would appreciate the level of VBA skills needed to build it.
As interns at a bank, I remember we once had the idea to make a multiplayer Tetris game running in Excel sheets that would load and write to a file on a shared drive to update the block positions...we didn't get very far, but man we had a lot of time on our hands...
Part of me still feels weird using New Excel. Even though it's over 15 years old, there are plenty of shops that only use Excel '97 with no plans to upgrade. The Excel '97-'03 variants are like AK-47s - simple, ugly, practical, and get the job done. One size fits all, you never have to worry about somebody not being able to open your sheet, the formatting screwing up, or some 64-bit VBA code not working on 32-bit machines and vice versa. And who needs 1 million rows anyway?
posted by pravit at 3:58 PM on March 26, 2013
As interns at a bank, I remember we once had the idea to make a multiplayer Tetris game running in Excel sheets that would load and write to a file on a shared drive to update the block positions...we didn't get very far, but man we had a lot of time on our hands...
Part of me still feels weird using New Excel. Even though it's over 15 years old, there are plenty of shops that only use Excel '97 with no plans to upgrade. The Excel '97-'03 variants are like AK-47s - simple, ugly, practical, and get the job done. One size fits all, you never have to worry about somebody not being able to open your sheet, the formatting screwing up, or some 64-bit VBA code not working on 32-bit machines and vice versa. And who needs 1 million rows anyway?
posted by pravit at 3:58 PM on March 26, 2013
I have to complain that it's actually written in VBA. I'm actually rather tempted to implement one without macros. I'm a bad person.
posted by ambrosen at 4:31 PM on March 26, 2013 [1 favorite]
posted by ambrosen at 4:31 PM on March 26, 2013 [1 favorite]
This puts new meaning in the term spreadsheet RPG...
Up next, implementing Eve Online in excel...
posted by Nanukthedog at 4:43 PM on March 26, 2013
Up next, implementing Eve Online in excel...
posted by Nanukthedog at 4:43 PM on March 26, 2013
The Schemaverse is a space-based strategy game implemented entirely within a PostgreSQL database. Compete against other players using raw SQL commands to command your fleet. Or, if your PL/pgSQL-foo is strong, wield it to write AI and have your fleet command itself!
posted by LogicalDash at 5:29 PM on March 26, 2013 [2 favorites]
posted by LogicalDash at 5:29 PM on March 26, 2013 [2 favorites]
Does this run in Open Office Calc? I've only got the starter version of Excel on this computer and it doesn't support macros.
posted by asnider at 5:52 PM on March 26, 2013
posted by asnider at 5:52 PM on March 26, 2013
No mac version once again.
Arena.Xlsm will not work on Mac versions of Microsoft Excel.
Mac people get screwed every time!
posted by cjorgensen at 6:21 PM on March 26, 2013 [1 favorite]
Arena.Xlsm will not work on Mac versions of Microsoft Excel.
Mac people get screwed every time!
posted by cjorgensen at 6:21 PM on March 26, 2013 [1 favorite]
Not the accounting simulator I was looking for.
posted by Ironmouth at 9:56 PM on March 26, 2013 [2 favorites]
posted by Ironmouth at 9:56 PM on March 26, 2013 [2 favorites]
This is a cool project, although it continues to make me sad that "role-playing game" has come to mean "elaborate fantasy combat simulation."
Did you happen to play many video games in the 80's?
Mac people get screwed every time!
The business school at the college I work for requires everybody to have Office for Windows for apparently similar reasons. We do SO MANY Bootcamp jobs every fall.
posted by Pope Guilty at 8:43 AM on March 27, 2013 [1 favorite]
Did you happen to play many video games in the 80's?
Mac people get screwed every time!
The business school at the college I work for requires everybody to have Office for Windows for apparently similar reasons. We do SO MANY Bootcamp jobs every fall.
posted by Pope Guilty at 8:43 AM on March 27, 2013 [1 favorite]
« Older "Legal advocate for the injured, disabled, and... | Good photos of cool rich midcentury Americans on... Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
posted by k5.user at 12:41 PM on March 26, 2013 [1 favorite]