Adventuring Underground
Issue 6
By Rob Merritt
Adventuring
Underground is a weekly feature that will cover the burgeoning community of shareware
and freeware adventure games available on the Internet.
A
few of you have written to Just Adventure or me with concerns about Adventuring
Underground. Before diving into part five of Making Your Own Adventure Game 101,
I will take just a moment to address some of these concerns.
Many of the
emails I’ve received are from people who want to know more about my background
and what qualifies me to write Adventuring Underground. I’ve been a hobbyist game
creator for 18 years. I started out typing out simple games in Basic on a Commodore
Vic-20 and have written several dozen games. I have fond memories of trying to
best games I saw in magazines like Compute! Most games I’ve written have
never been released on the Internet. I own and have used just about every game
creation tool ever released for home use. My current tool of choice is Multimedia
Fusion, and I’m working on a game called C.H.I.M.P. that will feature fully
rendered graphics and have a control scheme similar to the Alone in the Dark
games. It’s my biggest project to date, and I can guarantee it will not match
the quality of commercial games.
Speaking of commercial games: quite a few
people have written me with concerns that the articles I write will not help a
person succeed in the commercial market. I felt that my original statements in
Adventuring Underground Issue 1
were quite clear in that regard: I write from a hobbyist perspective for other
hobbyists. In fact, I am trying to write on a level such that a person who has
never made a game in his or her life will understand what I am talking about.
The knowledge I spout out is for people who want to spend a few weeks by themselves
creating a game for no other reason than their own enjoyment. Not every runner
wants to make the Olympics, not every artist wants to be Andy Warhol, and not
every game creator wants to be a professional. In short, yes, I know Visual Basic
doesn’t “cut it” at LucasArts, but it’s more than suitable in a hobbyist
home.
If you are really nosy, bored, or both, I have a section
on my home page that covers the games I’m working on.
The Creator’s
Toolbox
Making Your Own Adventure Game 101: Class 5–Building
Your First Adventure Game Part 2
In the two weeks since our last
session, you were supposed to draw 15 pictures using the paint utility that came
with your computer. You could also have just written paragraphs describing the
fifteen pictures if drawing scares you. The pictures were: a jail’s bar door closed
from inside of the jail; a jail’s bar door open from inside of the jail; a jail’s
bar door open from outside of the jail; a jail’s bed; a jail’s pot or toilet;
a jail’s wall; a door; the sheriff’s desk; a window with bars; a lock pick; and
a blow dart gun. Hopefully all of you realize that I just listed 11 items, not
15. Well, I messed up two weeks ago and left off four items. The other four are
a good ending, a bad ending, the intro, and a jail wall.
Here
is my finished game. My version of “Escape from Boot Hill Jail”
is totally unpolished, but it is functional. From start to finish, I spent about
90 minutes working on the game. I found limiting myself to the paintbrush utility
that came with Windows 95/98 to be a frustrating experience at best. Oh, how I
longed for the layers of Adobe Photoshop or the vectors of Corel Draw. However,
I didn’t want to cheat and not follow my own instructions. As you go to each room,
use your browser’s “view source” option to examine the HTML code. You
can use this code to copy and paste into your own game if you are a complete novice
to HTML.
I will discuss the logic that went into making my version of the
game for this exercise. You may, of course, do something completely different.
My main goal was to generate the simplest code that would get the job done. I
am fully aware that scripts and HTML formatting could have been used to make a
more elegant gaming experience, but then it would have added other layers of complexity
that many people aren’t ready or willing to deal with.
The first challenge
I had to overcome was how to deal with movement. Since I couldn’t write complex
scripts to create an engine that would handle loading pictures, keep track of
the location of the player, or other such matters, I decided to make each location
a separate web page, otherwise known as an HTML document. To begin with, I created
four HTML documents, each facing a direction in the jail cell. Then I padded the
world with a search option. With three objects to search in the jail, that brought
the total number of documents to seven.
The next challenge facing me was
how to handle inventory and variables. Once again, I made each a separate HTML
document. However, since objects and variables followed the player, I had to create
a whole series of HTML documents. When the player finds a key in the jail, the
player is sent to the series of HTML documents that have the player holding a
key. Just with one inventory item, I have a total of 14 different HTML documents.
When the door is open, I need to write more documents.
This may sound like
a lot of work, but it’s not. Most of the time, I just needed to load up a document,
change a single line and a few characters, and then save it as a different file.
As documents began to quickly pile up, I started a file-naming convention. The
first part of the file name is the room, the second is the one-letter direction,
and the last is the variable. An “r” is added to the name for when the
player is given a response. For example, jail-nk.html means the player is in the
jail, facing north, and has the key.
So basically, that’s it. I progressed
through each item, adding documents where needed, until I completed the body of
the game. Then I slapped on the introductions and the two endings. So look through
the sample I provided, and from that you should be able to construct your first
adventure game. Next week I’ll tell you where you can go from here.
Featured
Underground Game of the Week
There is no featured game of the week.
Why? Well, I’ve run out of freeware or shareware graphic adventure games to feature.
If you know of any, drop me a line and I’ll
take a look at it. Even if it’s just a web page about a game that is being worked
on and is still a long way off, I want to hear about it.
