You are sitting at your computer, the choices are: play your favourite arcade game, update your accounts, or pick up Keith Campbell's book of adventure and create your own fantasy workd. Be warned, take the final choice and you've taken on a real challenge.

The first few chapters are devoted to describing adventure games in general and briefly outline some adventure games currently on sale. Then you get down to planning your own game.

Once you have decided on your theme, objects to help or hinder and the treasure, the book shows you how to make a map of the area and from this how to work out a table of locations, exit codes and their associated destinations.

Next you draw up an object table giving the location of each object and flags indicating whether objects are fixed or movable. Mr. Campbell then shows how this information can be entered as data statements.

With this data in your computer, he goes on to detail how to handle strings and set up arrays and gives a clear explanation of conditional statements, all of which are essential for interpreting input instruction.

There's also a chapter which tells you how to present the results on the screen, but these are a bit of a struggle and it is suggested you check each stage step by step.

Having produced a skeleton you can put the 'flesh on the bone'. In Campbell's sample program this comprises doors concealed by wallpaper, swinging ropes and a life-saving umbrella.

The sample program is written on a TRS-80 but there are listings for the Spectrum, Commodore 64 and the BBC.

Nickie Robinson