Writing adventures is great fun, but hard work. Perhaps what you need is a language which is specifically designed to help create your own adventureland. There are many different programming languages to be found in the world of professional computing, all of which are designed to be particularly appropriate to a specific field. Fortran is favoured by mathematicians, whereas Cobol is the preferred language of data processing. For those would-be wizards amongst you who also have an interest in understanding how and why a new language is created, this book will be of special interest.

The ADL language aims to create a very simple set of instructions which can be used to write quite complex games. Like Basic, your program will need an interpreter to execute your commands and control the game. The program listing of the Interpreter is given in the book for you to type in and store on disc. There are also listings for a Screen Editor and Text Compressor to help you write and 'squeeze' the many lines of text you will need to describe the locations and objects in your fantasy world. These programs are available on disc.

A language specifically designed for adventure writing is already used by some of the larger software houses (Infocom and Level 9). To help explain the use of ADL, two games are fully listed and explained showing all the steps in the development.

To use the final system, you must have a disc drive to hold the interpreter while the game is played. If you want to skip the theory behind the working of the Interpreter and concentrate on writing games, you will find it moderately easy to use. However, the book's main appeal will be to students of computer science and those of you who have a slightly more serious interest in computing.