Exploring Adventures on the Spectrum 48K

Sinclair User

Richard Price

BREATHING LIFE INTO FANTASY Richard Price examines aids for adventures After the last goblin has been offed or the top secret plans recovered from some rusty casket in the quicksands, do you sit back with a mild feeling of dissatisfaction and wonder whether you couldn't do just as well yourself? Even if you can barely manage to program a nested loop in Basic it does not mean you cannot translate your feverish imaginings into electronic reality by creating your own adventure. You could be surprised to find your own game design is at least as exciting as a lot of the average and uninspiring offerings now on the market. Don't kid yourself, though, that over a weekend you're going to churn out a program that will knock spots off the The Hobbit. Whether you write your programs or use tailor-made utilities, design and careful planning will require a great deal of time and paperwork before you even get started on the keyboard. Assuming you have a theme and a convincing setting the first priority will be a location map and its accompanying descriptions. Drawing the map is a time-consuming process and it is best to use graph paper, leaving plenty of space between each box for notes, messages and so on. Print 'n' Plotter make a handy Adventure Chart with pre-drawn location boxes which should help simplify the task. The size of a large sketch pad has been produced primarily for players, but should be just as useful for games design. Once a preliminary map is completed you will feel your fantasy world is taking shape. Adding descriptions will help put living flesh on those bare bones and, if the text is inventive, informative and atmospheric it will increase the game's playability enormously. Take a look at the superb Level 9 games to see how detailed text can add to the overall effect. A word of warning - if you are a complete novice don't attempt a giant scenario with hundreds of locations. It's easier to practise on adventures with few locations and simple plots. Remember, too, that the Spectrum memory is limited and may not be able to cope with your dramatisation of War and Peace or the two thousand page Chronicles of Ganglewoop you have written in your spare time. The next step is to work out all the likely interconnections between the locations, listing them meticulously. Objects and treasures - some obvious, some hidden - must be scattered around and you must decide what purpose they will have for the explorer of your world. It is probably that area of design which produces most difficulty as a game will stand or fall on the originality of its problems and puzzles. If they are too tough or obscure players are likely to give up in disgust. If they are too simple there will be little challenge or incentive to continue. If you realise that a deduction problem will be impossible without help then put cryptic clues in the descriptions or the Help data. Anyone who has played Mountains of Ket will remember the magic word 'Polo' which gets you past the wall in 'mint condition'. Touches like that increase a program's attraction. Once again, you must keep track of all puzzles and the objects or conditions needed to solve them. Next you face the task of developing the game vocabulary. It is essential to provide a variety of synonyms wherever possible. That increases versatility and should mean that players will not constantly see 'I can't do that' or similar reports on screen. It is occasionally useful to include an action which can be achieved only by a particular word combination but there is nothing more aggravating to the adventurer than searching through the entire Oxford English Dictionary for some obscure synonym. Having created that large interlocking network of places, characters, objects and actions the major problem of getting your creation into the computer then pokes you in the eye. Don't panic. The market is well provided with books and programming utilities to help you. If you have little programming experience it is essential that you do some preparatory reading and practise. Many routines used in adventure are standard and, once learned, can be re-used time and again with new data. Not all books on adventure programming are as useful as they may claim on the back cover. One of the simplest and clearest is Write Your Own Adventure Programs from Osbourne. Jenny Tyler and Les Howarth have made no assumptions about their readership and write in an uncomplicated style, taking you step by step through the entire process. The book is not Spectrum-specific but includes a section showing all the necessary conversions into Sinclair Basic. ZX-81 owners will find that they also have not been forgotten. Like most other books it takes a model adventure as its base and uses pleasantly daft illustrations to demonstrate the various processes. At £1.99 the paperback is extremely good value and contains as much information as many of the more expensive tomes on the shelves. However, because it is not machine-specific it does not run a section on graphics - as if they mattered anyway. Spectrum Adventures - Sunshine Books, £5.95 - by Tony Bridge and Roy Carnell is more sophisticated, more expensive. Like many of the large books it includes a history of the computer adventure whilst the main body of the book concentrates on the creation of a graphic adventure. It is not to be recommended for beginners but if you want hints on the use of graphics it may prove useful. It contains information on combat sequences, in true Carnell D & D style, and has the full listing of a 48K game. Adventures do not always stick to the preset location style. Robert Speel's paperback New Adventure Systems for the Spectrum - Fontana, £3.95 - gives listings and advice on a number of formats. Speel makes things easier by slicing up the programs into sections, each of which can be added to a foundation program. He tends to gloss over how the routines work and the use of Sinclair printer listings makes reading a bit daunting. One of the best and most user-friendly guides is Peter Gerrard's Exploring Adventures on the Spectrum 48K - Duckworth, £6.95. The three sample programs are pure text games and the author discusses data handling concepts with clarity and some sympathy for those who wriggle in panic when phrases like 'numeric arrays' are bandied about. As a general guide, beware of books which contain vast listings and precious little else. Those programs take time to type in and will not necessarily teach you much about the structures they use. Always go for books which provide adequate explanations. If you are not prepared to devote the time required for developing programming skills you will have to obtain a commercial adventure-writing program. The Quill is now justly famous and can produce machine-coded games of high quality and fast response. At £14.95 cheap it isn't but it offers the embryonic games designer a means of creating complex scenarios quickly and slickly without any programming knowledge at all. The program is menu driven and includes a comprehensive instruction booklet, and though the style is sometimes difficult it is worth persisting until you understand it. Although a simple graphic set is included in the package The Quill is not intended for games needing complex graphics. You will find that there is room for about 30K of data, enough for lots of locations and fine detail. With imagination you will be able to make commercially viable adventures as others have done already - look at the software ads and you will see. Dungeon Builder from Dream appears slightly more user-friendly than The Quill. It features a graphics capability using a sketch pad style to draw screens. The functions are manipulated by menus and the location map is shone on screen using a system of interconnecting cells. Regrettably, its available memory is quite limited - around 10K - and that is a disadvantage in creating large adventures. The Dungeon Master - Crystal Computing - is a different kettle of fish. This game program allows you to create a monster-bashing scenario set in an underground labyrinth. All the hazards, treasures and options are predefined and give little scope for exercising your own imagination. You will not be able to use it to make standard text adventures but you should find it entertaining if you enjoy a bit of hacking and smashing. It is often said that computer gaming is an essentially passive occupation, stunting the imagination and critical faculties. Anyone who has played adventure will know that to be an unjustified and sweeping generalisation. If you decide to go further and create your own adventures you will certainly extend your imaginative range and logical skills. You might even trawl a little brass on the way.

Micro Adventurer

John Fraser

ADVENTURE PROGRAMS BROUGHT TO BOOK John Fraser leafs through a selection of books on how to design your own adventures. Next month sees the start of a regular book review section, covering computer books, game books, and related topics. ADVENTURE PROGRAMS BROUGHT TO BOOK John Fraser leafs through a selection of books on how to design your own adventures. Next month sees the start of a regular book review section, covering computer books, game books, and related topics. Despite the growing popularity of commercial adventures, many enthusiasts prefer to draw on the worlds of their own imagination, rather than someone else's. But, sometimes, the sheer size and complexity of the task is enough to deter them altogether, with the result that they never progress beyond playing prepackaged scenarios. If you happen to be one of these frustrated adventurers, there is no longer any need to despair, because now experienced programmers have recognised your plight and set down on paper their accumulated wisdom with the express aim of teaching you the art. It must be said, however, that this wealth of literature on how to write your own wonderful mind-bending adventures, is not going to solve your problems overnight. Furthermore, the very concept of such books raises a number of questions which ought to be considered before you unplug your micro and rush into the nearest branch of W H Smith. Firstly, there is nothing quite so tedious as being hunched over a keyboard (particularly the Spectrum's) for several hours in an attempt to translate your brilliant idea into seemingly endless screenfuls of code. Unless you can afford an adventure-generating program such as The Quill or Dungeon Builder, that's exactly what you are in for - and not even the books will remove that drudgery. Not surprisingly, few adventure enthusiasts write a game just for something, to do on a rainy afternoon. Generally, the motivation is at least partly financial: the thought of earning a living from one's hobby, perhaps even of tax havens or a yacht in the Mediterranean. Whatever your ultimate ambition, do not be misled by those blurbs which promise that "you'll soon be creating magnificent games of your own." No book can teach you to do that, but what they can provide you with are the necessary techniques and concepts; the rest depends on the power of your own imagination. Secondly, the programming techniques used in writing adventures are much the same as those used in writing other programs. Once you know how to input data into an array, manipulate strings and so on, you will be well on the way to being able to write one. On the other hand, if such things only induce anxiety, you would do better to buy one of the numerous introductory books available and get to grips with the fundamentals of Basic first. Finally, ask yourself what you really want a book for, because if it's just to key in someone elses listing, you'll have a pretty good idea of how to solve the game before you even run it. Almost certainly, it will take you much less time to solve than it did to key in, which makes all those hours of toil seem rather pointless. After what I've written so far, you may have reached the conclusion that all these hefty volumes crammed with unbelievably long listings are nothing more than publishing gimmicks created to enlarge the bank accounts of struggling authors and publishers. Well, this is not entirely true; there is a range of books to suit most tastes, and some are genuinely useful. Most of these titles follow an, almost identical pattern: explanation, historical introduction, worked example. They differ widely, however, in the amount of information they contain and the number and type (i.e, text or graphic) of adventures which they describe. Some offer several listings for each micro; others offer several versions of the same listing; and a few even fail to specify which machine was used to produce them. Hopefully, by the time you've read this article, you'll be in a better position to decide which is the book for you - or even whether you need one at all. To begin with, let's examine a couple of books which are not machine-specific, but which nevertheless contain listings that can easily be adapted for the Spectrum. The first of these makes a radical departure from the standard format. Andrew Nelson's Creating Adventure Programs on your Computer is - or so the blurb proclaims - "another great book from Interface Publications." Instead of beginning with the usual explanation of what an adventure game is and how they developed, it launches straight into a mini-adventure similar to those in Penguin's Fighting Fantasy Gamebook series; this is then used as the author's first computer adventure. Unfortunately, my copy of the book appears to have met with a disaster in the printing works, and sorting out the text is itself something of an adventure. However, no one else seems to have had the same problem. Interface first published the book in October 1983, and have received no other complaints about it. SOPHISTICATION For all that, the book is quite useful. Andrew Nelson has provided three games of increasing sophistication, with both a basic and an elaborated version of the first offering, Werewolves and Wanderers. He's also generously included a print-out of the screen displays which shows you what the game is like actually running. Only Werewolves and Wanderers is described in any detail, although this doesn't matter very much as the second game, a space adventure, demonstrates how it can be used as the foundation for totally different scenarios, without having to start from scratch. All you do is load the first game and work through the listing, changing the lines where appropriate. The final game consists of over forty locations and demands rather more brawn than brain, as there's plenty of monster bashing. Despite this limitation, and a small vocabulary, you are able to control your attributes and so the game is not the same every time you play it. There are also helpful appendices, including a character name generator, a section on further reading, and a list of games manufacturers and distributors. Chapter 21 (which, incidentally, has been printed twice) offers suggestions for enhancing the appeal of your games and, though brief, gives some advice worth considering. As far as I can discover, the book makes no mention of which machine was used to produce the listings, but converting them for the Spectrum should be no problem. At least with Keith Campbell's Computer and Video Games Book of Adventure you don't get lost trying to sort out the pages. It's a well produced and readable book, but because it's not machine-specific it may well cause some annoyance to those who want value for money - and who doesn't these days? Only one game is described, and there are listings for the BBC, Spectrum and Commodore 64. This means, inevitably, that if you only have one machine much of the book will be of no use to you. Add to that the demonstration program which was written on a TRS 80 and the conversion notes, and you may well be disappointed. According to no less an authority than Scott Adams, who has written the foreword, the book contains "a wonderful recipe for baking your own adventures." Maybe so, but I expect some readers will take that with a pinch of magic potion. It's one thing to have the right ingredients, but quite an other to turn those ingredients into a commercial product. The game itself is notably lacking in complexity. With only ten locations it nowhere near matches the scale of those in some of the other books reviewed here. Nevertheless, it's likely to appear rather less daunting to the newcomer and the text is clearly written, with each stage of the programming covered in easily digested portions. Most Spectrum users, however, will naturally want a book that is machine specific, and there are three which can be recommended. Which is the better book is really a matter of personal preference, how familiar you are with Basic, whether you like text or graphic adventures, and what your expectations are. Of the three, one stands out as being more of a collection of listings to key in and run. In fact Creating Adventure Programs on the ZX Spectrum, written by those teenage whizz-kids Peter Shaw and James Mortleman, offers no less than seven adventures for £4.95. The first half of the book looks at the necessary techniques - creating locations, adding graphics and so on - but the explanations are minimal, which is no bad thing as you're likely to learn more by following a listing through to see how it works. One book which covers both text and graphic adventures is Noel Williams' invent and Write Games Programs for the Spectrum. Although the word adventure appears nowhere in the title, adventures are the author's main concern, and he provides three examples, together with many more useful routines. The first game, The Throne of Camelot, is a traditional puzzle adventure with over sixty locations. Then there is The Mines of Merlin, a role playing type game in which your attributes and possessions are continually updated as you battle with monsters and wander through dark caverns. Finally, in Treasure Trove, you use the cursor keys to manoeuvre a little man around the screen to pick up jewels before your time runs out. The adventure element of the last program is debatable, but the game is thoroughly explained and illustrates techniques for those who wish to incorporate arcade action into their adventures. Noel Williams has done his best to cater for every interest. He can't obviously devote an equal amount of space to everything, so you don't get a highly elaborate graphic adventure, for instance. Even so, the book is remarkably comprehensive and will no doubt gain a wide readership not only among adventurers, but also among those interested in other games who recognise the universal value of the techniques used. The final book reviewed is perhaps the one most likely to appeal to the uninitiated, even though the author (if we are to believe his introductory remarks) does have to sustain himself with large quantities of alcohol when playing adventures! Peter Gerrard's Exploring Adventures on the Spectrum 48K contains three text adventures which only accept simple verb-noun inputs, but are nevertheless far more substantial offerings than those in similar books. One of the games, Underground Adventure, contains no less than one hundred locations and is fully explained, section by section. Only the listings are presented for the other two, but if you have followed Underground Adventure, this should be no handicap.

Your Spectrum

Peter Jackson

NOVEL ADVENTURES Obsessed by adventure, Peter Jackson girds his loins and boldly goes where few reviewers have gone before - to the shelves of the local bookstore. His mission? To discover what goes to make a prime adventure tutor for the Speccy. Adventure n. - Remarkable happening: enterprise; risk; bold exploit; commercial speculation. - Collins Gem English Dictionary. To start with, here's a small competition for adventure game players: spot the bit of the above definition that rarely crops up in the dungeons. Correct. Part two: spot the bit that has brought us so many books on Spectrum adventures. Correct again. But the commercial speculation in the adventure book world is more subtle than the usual bandwagon-jumping that's done by authors and publishers, though that is certainly going on (note Melbourne House's tome explaining The Hobbit 'help' messages, for one). No, these books are also an appeal to reader's commercial interests. You won't find this group of Spectrum users rubber-keying its way through multi-K adventure listings in Basic just out of curiosity - or just to play the resulting game when all the answers are in the listings anyway. What these readers want is to learn how to produce adventures that they can sell for vast amounts of money. Take the final few paragraphs of Keith Campbell's Computer and Video Games Book ofAdventure for example. "If you now have a game popular with friends and family, you might consider the possibility of getting it published," says Campbell. And a few lines later: "I... look forward to playing and possibly reviewing your adventures in the future!' (Campbell, like many other writers in the adventure field, is addicted to exclamation marks. It gives some ersatz excitement to the prose, like this!!!) At least his book gives some useful advice about the real purpose of writing your own adventures. The others under review are a little more coy, with one of them remarking vaguely that the author is "sometimes tempted to think that the mercenary attitude shines through on occasions!" (note that '!'). Perhaps several months should be spent writing an adventure just to amuse family and friends and to impress them with your programming prowess and resistance to boredom? It's interesting to note that Campbell and most of the other authors in this book batch have had adventures published by some games house or other. Peter Gerrard, for example, is described in the blurb of his Exploring Adventures on the Spectrum 48K as the "author of two top-selling adventure games for the Commodore 64" (?). And Roy Carnell, author with Tony Bridge of Spectrum Adventures, has his own eponymous adventure software house. THRILLS FOR SALE To paraphrase Dr Johnson; "Sir, no-one but a fool ever wrote an adventure except for money." So - fair enough - I decided to examine the five books from the point of view of making money; to be honest, I'm by no means immune to the temptation of writing a 'top-selling adventure' myself. One thought struck almost immediately - the programming in adventures is not very difficult. Long, certainly; convoluted, yes; but not actually difficult. The main purpose in adventures is to understand the player's typed input and relate this to stored information about objects, locations and problems in the fantasy world created by the programmer. (At least, that's what I think it is. We'll be coming back to what some of the authors think it is later.) Programming this requires a bit of string slicing, a lot of checking against arrays, some setting and testing of flags, and a whole raft of IF - THEN - GOTOs and ON-GOTOs. The main problem is continuity, the linking together of locations, objects and actions, but that's a debugging and play-testing problem rather than a programming one. What stops people writing adventure programs, then, is not so much difficulty as problems of scale. Adventures are so darn big that they can daunt the beginner, warnings in the books about what you can do if you run out of memory are more frightening when you have 48K than when you only have 16K. All the authors have addressed themselves to this confidence problem in various ways - and with varying degrees of success. THE SHAPE'S THE SAME Despite differing approaches to the actual programming, all the books seem to follow a set pattern. First there is an explanation of fantasy and role-playing games and that's followed by a description of Dungeons and Dragons with all the obligatory copyright and trademark blurb from TSR. Then comes an outline study of the original mainframe adventure, descriptions of the early micro versions, and eventually the author gets into his own programs. About the weirdest candidate for this stock structure comes in Spectrum Adventures by Bridge and Carnell. The usual stuff about Crowther and Woods, Scott Adams et al, is just as expected, and there are descriptions and examples of such classic text adventures as Colossal Cave and Level 9's Dungeon Adventure. There's even a separate chapter on The Hobbit. Then the authors start programming and the game they have chosen to illustrate adventures is a pure graphic, 'move about on the screen and belt monsters', arcade-style thing that bears little relation to the heritage they are claiming. It's called Eye of the Star Warrior, and those fearing the mammoth task of typing it all in will be pleased to learn that it's also available on cassette. Chapter six of Spectrum Adventures offers some self-justification for using a 'graphic adventure' (the phrase is theirs, I'd prefer 'arcade knockabout') to demonstrate adventure programming technique. "In this way we can present the maximum number of techniques", it says. "The second reason is simple - a text adventure, while being a lot of fun to play, is not much of a surprise after being typed in from a listing!", it goes on. Leaving the exclamation mark aside, this seems to me like turning a bug into a feature. The most famous adventure programs ever are all pure text (leaving aside The Hobbit which is a very mediocre adventure indeed without the pictures) and giving the thrill-thirsting public something that isn't really an adventure at all is a bit much. Pardon my continued ranting, but if this book was meant to describe arcade games it should say so in the title. It will not do for the authors to say, as they do in Chapter six, that "the section on generating the room complex will be just as valid in a text game, as will the movement routines", particularly when the 'complex' consists of a three-level array of identical cubicle rooms differing only in their monstrous graphic contents. Similar criticisms, only less spiteful, can be made of a book I haven't mentioned before: Andrew Nelson's Creating Adventure Programs on Your Computer. We're not told whether Nelson has his trotters in the published game trough, only that he has spent "the last 18 months devising, programming and playing computer Adventure games". But it seems safe to assume that he's in it for the moolah, just like the rest of us. Be that as it may. his book is the only one in the stack that doesn't follow the standard pattern. There's no history lesson, but before jumping headfirst into the programming. Nelson does provide one or two interesting sidelines. First he gives a little non-computer adventure game, reminiscent of Penguin's Fighter Fantasy Gamebooks in its programmed learning course layout. This forms the basis of his first game listing, Werewolves and Wanderer, and he also shows a printout of the program actually running - a feature other authors should copy. Nelson gives three games listings, all based on the same techniques and increasing in complexity through the book. Only the first has its programming described in detail, with the code split into short sections and explained. It's left as an exercise to the reader to figure out how these techniques are used in the later games, but there's nothing too difficult. All three have much more in common with the adventure classics than Bridge and Carnell's example. But that's not to say that Nelson's work is entirely kosher. As the sample runs show, the aims of the games are to explore an environment, pick up treasure and kill monsters. True, the room descriptions will be more familiar to the old-timers, but the player's vocabulary is limited to a set of one-letter commands and the puzzle-solving aspect of adventures is sadly neglected in favour of 'slash and bash'. All three games were created on the IBM PC, but since they are text-only there are few problems in converting them to run on the Spectrum (or anything else for that matter), and the largest of them only sucks up around 18K. Nelson's book is published by Interface - which made it quite a surprise to find another Interface book in the stack, and one sporting a similar title: Creating Adventure Programs on the ZX Spectrum. It's writ by our own Peter Shaw along with fellow infant prodigy, James Mortleman. This is the most lightweight of the quintet, the bulk of the book being taken up with the listings of several simple adventures. But these are what I would call real adventures, with puzzles to solve, equipment to figure out, and other stock situations. At least Shaw and Mortleman have resisted overburdening the pages with explanation of the straightforward programming required; the listings tell the story themselves. And the listings are also short enough to run through without fear. THE WINNERS And finally, we come whizzing back to Keith Campbell and his Computer and Video Games Book of Adventure, and Peter Gerrard's Exploring Adventures on the Spectrum 48K. To my mind, these are easily the two best books in the batch. Both written by published game authors, they are traditional in the type of game they describe and they clearly and succinctly explain each stage in the programming of a traditional adventure. Both follow stock format, with history and brief descriptions of published games at the front, followed by programming details for one game on three machines (Campbell), or three games on one machine (Gerrard). But Gerrard's book wins it, and not just because he has the advantage of being able to concentrate on the Spectrum alone. Demo or no demo, Campbell's adventure program is trivial, and if you produced a similar game using the techniques given you'd be laughed out of every software house waiting room in the land. Gerrard's, on the other hand, are the real thing. They're of the right commercial scale and - once again - it's no surprise to find the games available on cassette from the book publisher, with changes in locations and objects you could well have a sellable game on your hands. Gerrard also gets high marks for providing a set of scenarios that the reader could use to get a foot in the door of those mirth-ridden software houses. One final point (and really an admission of prejudice) both Campbell and Gerrard produce 'real' adventures and their books have also proved a few points to my satisfaction. First, lots of the adventure games you come across are nothing of the sort. Second, writing adventure programs is a lot more difficult to start and finish; the actual coding seems a piece of cake. And third, I now know that I could write a wonderful adventure game if I only had the time... or perhaps a good adventure book? One last gripe from someone who is within 'the biz'. Any publisher who allows the sort of production cock-ups that have marred all the five books here - typographical errors, misspellings, misregistered printing, misbound and repeated sections of pages, and mis-just-about-everything-else - would not keep my valued custom. And yet all these books cost more than a reasonably good adventure cassette. 'Commercial speculation' is right, and so, nearly, was Dr Johnson.

WE LOOKED AT... Computer & Video Games Book of Adventure by Keith Campbell Melbourne House ISBN 0-86161-143-8 £5.95 Exploring Adventures on the Spectrum 48K by Pete Gerrard Duckworth ISBN 0-7156-1796-6 £6.95 Spectrum Adventures by Tony Bridge & Roy Carnell Sunshine ISBN 0-946408-07-6 £5.95 Creating Adventure Programs On Your Computer by Andrew Nelson Interface ISBN 0-907563-36-8 £4.95 Creating Adventure Programs on the ZX Spectrum by Peter Shaw & James Mortleman Interface ISBN 0-907563-58-9 £4.95

Read it at Your Spectrum Unofficial Archive