★ APPLICATIONS ★ AIDE A LA CREATION DE JEUX ★ Create a small world! ★ |
| Mini-Adventure Creator (CPC Computing) | Applications Aide A La Creation De Jeux |
Make your own mini adventures with CLIVE GIFFORD'S time-saving utility LOVE 'em or hate 'em, adventures are here to stay. What started as a massive program hidden in a university mainframe has become a boom industry with millions of followers. We have previously printed several mini-adventures which have proved quite popular. So if you fancy a go at writing your own but can't manage the programming, let Scribe do the hard work for you. The idea is that you design your adventure and type the information into Scribe, which will then run it for you. Before using the utility, however, it's a good idea to produce a plan of the game along with a table of object names and starting locations, as shown in Figure I. When this has been completed you can begin to input the data. Firstly you need to enter the number of objects and locations that will make up the adventure. Then every object's data is typed in, and this takes the form of the name followed by a comma and the location number. You'll then have to say whether or not the object can be taken, with 1 meaning yes and 0 no. Specifying a negative value will cause that much damage when the player attempts to take the object. As some locations may include doors or gates that require unlocking, we have to say if an object is a key or similar device. This is done at the next prompt by entering 2, and care should be taken not to end up with a key that's needed to open a door but cannot be picked up. Once finished, it's time to enter the descriptions of the locations along with the directions ip which movement is allowed. When the descriptive part of a location has been typed in you'll be prompted for every one of the six possible directions. In Figure I, travelling north from the forest puts us next to a gate, whereas south takes us to the clearing. To enter this information we input the location numbers, which in this case are 3 for north, and 2 for south. It isn't possible to travel in the other four directions - East, West, Up and Down - so we enter the value zero. Examining location three shows the presence of a gate, which by its very nature will require some action before allowing us to progress westward. This is done by turning the value for west into a negative number, in this case 4. There is no need to set a negative value for east in location four, as the gate must have been opened for us to get there. Only two things remain to be entered, the first of which is the player's initial strength. This value is decreased each time a command is accepted, and trying to take damaging objects will decrease it even further. The objective is to reach a certain location before your strength falls to zero. This location is the last thing to be entered when setting up the adventure. The program shows some of the more useful tips for adventure writers, including how to treat the player as a location - in this case location 0. This allows objects to be taken and dropped simply by altering their location number. As the routine is rather short you may wish to enhance it a little, adding extra commands, a save and load routine or a few monsters to bash. If you wish to attempt the built-in adventure - Enchanted Castle -before entering your own data, type Y at the pre-programmed data prompt. The currently available commands are North, South, East, West, Up, Down, Take, Drop, Unlock and Quit. To use the Take and Drop instructions, first enter the command, press Return, and when asked, enter the object's name.
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