DIY adventure editor

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Gilsoft's The Quill is a system whereby the non-programmer can still write an adventure game. It first appeared a couple of years ago for the Spectrum, and since then a considerable number of Quilled adventures have been placed on the market for that machine.

One thing should be made clear - it may remove some of the programming slog from writing an adventure, but there is still some hard work left for whoever uses it.

You still have to design your own game, create locations, descriptions and so on (though they provide an initial action vocabulary), and to be successful commercially you will have to produce a really good game as an end product. What The Quill does do, however, is to give non-programmers a second way of entering the adventure game market.

The first is to create a good story line and persuade an established software house like Level 9 to code and market it.

The Quill provides an alternative, do-it-yourself facility.

The manual provides a good, careful introduction to the processes needed to use The Quill properly. There is even a mini-adventure to type in with various checkpoints as you go along to help get the beginner started.

A three level function key strip is provided so that the most crucial status marker-flags in a game can be entered easily - very helpful indeed.

If you have always wanted to write an adventure game, but have been put off by the programming skills required, this product is tailor-made for you. If I had

Bob Redrup