Recommended Adventure

Ever felt like you had a great idea for an adventure but were put off by the programming? Incentive Software has come up with the answer by producing - in effect - a programming language specifically for adventures.

That's perhaps overstating it a little. What the program does is to allow you to build up the substance of an adventure - the commands, the descriptions, objects and events, while taking care of the nitty-gritty.

The software handles things like the language parser - which makes sense of what the player types in. It also allows you to build up the plan of the adventure very easily. Creating a room is a simple matter of giving it a number, writing a description and then saying what exits there are.

You can also assign a screen display to each room. These are created with a simple artist program and stored in a separate file. You also give the system a list of words, including verbs, adverbs, nouns, objects and so on. Then comes the clever part. You can write rules associated with the words, the objects and the room, so that quite complex interactions can be built up. The method of creating the rules is faintly reminiscent of Prolog.

Tricky things, such as routines to save and load the current game position, and linking rooms and objects, are all handled by the system. At any time you can save the adventure to disc or tape so that you can resume work on it later. And, when the game is finished, it is saved as a standalone file, which is started by *RUN [filename].

There are many sophisticated features to this program. The important thing, however, is that it frees adventure writers from the drudgery of coding and allows them to concentrate on the imaginative and creative side of the process. Highly recommended.

Steve Mansfield