Assassins - Ultimate CD Games Collection 2/Assassins 2 - Ultimate Games No. 2 (1995)(Weird Science)[!][Amiga-CD32-CDTV].iso/misc/life_after_death/general_junk.doc

Text File | 1992-05-26 | 9KB | 239 lines

            General Adventure Notes
                        ~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~


  I have included this file simply for those who like reading .doc files,
as it contains no useful information related to the game.


Me
~~

    I have never really been that good at playing adventure games
myself, as I haven't ever completed one. The games which I have attempted
at sometime in the past are:

    The Hobbit    -    I first saw this one lunchtime at primary
                school, as some of the older girls were
                playing it on a 48k ZX Spectrum. They left
                it for a couple of friends and I to muck
                about on, but none of us had ever seen an
                adventure game before, so didn't really
                know what to do with it. For those of you
                who know The Hobbit, the game was left to
                us with the character being stuck in the
                goblins' dungeon. We just spent half an
                hour typing things such as 'use the short
                strong sword as a key' etc, and we got
                absolutely nowhere.
                  Later when my brother bought the game
                for our Commodore 64, I managed a bit
                better. I killed the dragon and took his
                treasure, but unfortunately I still
                haven't figured out how to get back
                through the wood.

    Zork I        -    I didn't really play this, as I didn't
                have a disk-drive, but I saw it on my
                nextdoor neighbour's computer, and was
                pretty impressed.

    Can't remember its
        name    -    I played this game, written in basic on my
                Commodore 64 ages ago, although I have
                forgotten its name. It came on '64 Tape
                Computing', and was full of science fiction
                characters from various books.

    Seabase Delta     -    Anyone heard of this? It was one of those
                cheap Mastertronic 299 range things. It
                was actually not bad, although the parser
                infuriated me. This gave me the idea for
                one of my own earlier adventure games.

    Golden Fleece    -    Yep. Good old Golden Fleece. I love this
                game, as it possesses a real 'adventure'
                feel, as well as quite a bit of humour.
                I can't get very far at all on it, but I
                still like it. I need to get a proper copy of
                this though, as I only played mine for a couple
                of days before it got Lamer! exterminated.

    Planetfall    -    I only bought this one a couple of months
                ago when it came out as a budget release.
                It too has a very 'adventure' feel to it,
                and it seems to be able to understand most
                things that I tell it to do. The problem
                is that I can't get terribly far here
                either. There is a key that I need inside
                a narrow crack in the floor, and I can't
                get at it. Can anyone help?

   Well, that's it as far as playing other people's adventure games goes.
Now for the (yawn!) games that I have written in the past:

    Atlantas    -    Hm. I couldn't even spell Atlantis when I
                wrote this, but I was only 8 years old, so
                I can hardly be blamed. The game followed
                the simple Troll, Goblin format, and
                although it was very simple, it was over
                30K long, which was quite big for a C64
                basic program. I stored it on cassette,
                and I think that I still have it somewhere.

    House of Horrors-    This was my first proper adventure. I had
                just purchased the Usborn book 'Write
                your own adventure programs', so this game
                was based quite heavily on that book.
                Instead of typing in the example program,
                called Haunted House, I decided to write
                my own, which was quite similar. This game
                went through a number of phases, but was
                eventually chewed-up by my C64 tape-deck.
                It is interesting to see how similar the
                structure of my adventures is to the format
                layed out by the Usborn book. Ok, so my
                parsers are better, the descriptions are
                longer etc, but I still use the same old
                variables and subroutines which I always
                have.

    The Journey    -    This was my first attempt at a game which
                involved animated characters. The game was
                nothing special, but if you stood around
                for long enough, then other characters
                would complete it for you!
                This was also chewed-up by the tape-deck.

Things get a bit fuzzy here, as I went through I phase of making a couple
of games a week, most of which were either never finished, or were lost in
my terrible program filing system.
Out of this period emerged one single game, which was completed when I was
10 years-old:

    Raid on Station Zero
            -    I loved this one at the time. It was
                massive, written on my new C128, and was
                full of huge location descriptions. This
                was eventually chewed-up as well (I
                seriously needed a disk-drive!), but then
                five years later, I found my original map
                and objects list stuffed in an old book.
                I now had an Amiga, so I re-made the
                entire game in Amigabasic (it almost killed
                me). This game was then ported to AMOS,
                and tarted up to play quite nicely. It is
                currently my most padded game, as apart
                from the large map, long descriptions and
                hundreds of (quite useless) objects, it
                was also rather playable.
                  If anybody should want to play this,
                then just send me a disk and an SAE, but I
                don't think that I'll release it, as to
                tell the truth, I feel that I might regret
                it. I can't see anything wrong with the
                game, but I am paranoid enough to think that
                simply because I designed it when I was ten
                it must have a useless plot. My friends have
                assured me that this is not the case, but
                for some reason I don't want to release it.
                If I overcome this paranoia in the future
                then the game may be seen, because it has
                a great deal of atmosphere, and quite
                artistic descriptions for the locations.

    School Game    -    This was silly. It was quite a large game
                set in my school, and featured every single
                member of my class, animated. They all
                interacted with each other in realistic ways,
                and it was fun to play simply to see what
                everybody would do to each other. This game
                is currently sitting in a dusty 5.25 disk
                box, as it was written on the C128, so is
                no-longer usable.

    Alien!        -    I made this over a weekend for a friend,
                and it is based around the 'Alien' film.
                The parser is only a VERB NOUN job, and the
                descriptions are only a line long, but it
                is quite fun to play, and all the characters
                ,including the alien are completely animated.




~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

    Right, that's enough about me. Now for some adventure game ideas,
questions etc.


~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  I have often wondered what it is that makes an adventure game seem
complex and rounded in its feel. Just by looking at them, some games just
seem to be more professional than others. As far as I can tell, this boils
down to a few points:

    The screen display needs to be as bare as possible. Just text against
a tastefully boring background colour.

    The program should multi-task. I don't think that this would be
massively useful, but it makes the game feel friendlier. I wish AMOS would
work with other programs.

    The text should not come up terribly fast, and should be jerky as it
scrolls. This makes it look like the computer is actually thinking hard
about what it is writing on the screen, and that it is not simply pre-written
walls of text flashing by. On my adventures the text whizzes past, although
I can never be bothered to change this.

    Lots of disk-access makes the game seem large and complex, although
this can be annoying if long waits are needed.

Well, there you have it. Totally pointless points, as none of them really
affect the game itself; it is just what I find makes a game seem more
professional. I realise that my games very rarely follow these points, as
at the moment I write in AMOS basic, in which it is difficult to make
anything go slowly.


    I have recently been experimenting writing games in C. Due to
severe lack of funds, I use NorthC, although I have produced quite a nice
working environment, and it all goes quite nicely; I made most of my
Alien game in C to see how it worked. If my C programming continues to
improve at the rate it has recently, then my next game could be in C. This
would mean that it could multi-task and work in a workbench window, and
look very Infocom in its style.


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


Well, that's it. This .doc file may be longer next time you see it, and if
you have any thoughts to contribute to it then please send me a disk/note,
as opposed to just changing it on the file.

Adventure games which I may (but most likely won't) make:

    Bill & Ted            -    Well, why not?

    Star Trek - The next generation

    The Hobbit - The next generation


~


                        3rd May 1992

                    James Lean
                    9 Stone Close
                    Taunton
                    TA1 4YG
                    England