The Ballpoint

[Ralf]

Good research!

[Morkin]

Interesting - I can understand why people might want to tweak the Quill engine a bit - I personally thought it was quite flexible but there may have been features people wanted to add or change.

From what I understand, Gilsoft were obviously aware that people would want to produce commercial games using their product and it was only a polite request that The Quill be credited, not a stipulation.

I don't know why writers of 'tweaked-Quill' games would mind that their games were associated with the tool, or claim that they'd written a new game engine though. Perhaps there were so many Quill'd games written by independent authors, they wanted to distance themselves from them? Obviously this is all pure conjecture..

[8BitAG]

Interesting - I can understand why people might want to tweak the Quill engine a bit - I personally thought it was quite flexible but there may have been features people wanted to add or change.

There were quite a few things that the Quill was lacking. Many were added in later updates to the engine and in the expansions, such as Illustrator and the Patch. The Spectrum version came out first so early games made with that initial "serial A" are very similar... it was only in later releases, for example, that you could customise the standard system messages.

I've put a whole document together that compares the various releases of the Quill on the Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, C64, BBC/Electron, QL, Oric 1, Atari, Apple II and IBM PC... http://8bitag.com/info/documents/Quill- ... erence.pdf (some of those versions were produced in the US as the Adventure Writer).

From what I understand, Gilsoft were obviously aware that people would want to produce commercial games using their product and it was only a polite request that The Quill be credited, not a stipulation.

There is a difference between not crediting Gilsoft, and not crediting Gilsoft and slagging their adventure system off in the press while secretly still using huge chunks of it in the background to power what you are passing off as your own system. If that is indeed what was going on.

I don't know why writers of 'tweaked-Quill' games would mind that their games were associated with the tool, or claim that they'd written a new game engine though. Perhaps there were so many Quill'd games written by independent authors, they wanted to distance themselves from them? Obviously this is all pure conjecture..

At the time of the Smart Egg games there was quite a stigma attached to games that were produced with the Quill. A big publisher would often want to disassociate themselves from that. There are various games that are produced using "heavily modified versions" or, as in the case of Dodgy Geezers and Terrormolinos, where the Quill was used to develop the game on before it was "recoded".

Smart Egg undoubtedly added some clever features to their games... the graphics in the remade Golden Eggcup, for instance... a great improvement on the line-and-fill technique of the Illustrator, in terms of speed at least.

*this thread is from December 2018, by the way... but it's nice to have a bit of extra feedback.

[Morkin]

Heheh - 2018 is still fairly recent

Quill, Illustrator and Patch - the holy trinity of adventure games..! Oh, and the Press. The holy... err... Quaternity?? I think the Patch must have been responsible for the appearance of telephones as usable objects for most of the following year's adventure games...

There is a difference between not crediting Gilsoft, and not crediting Gilsoft and slagging their adventure system off in the press while secretly still using huge chunks of it in the background to power what you are passing off as your own system. If that is indeed what was going on.

Absolutely - very cheeky, even Harry Price kept quiet when it came to bragging about his game engine...

A big publisher would often want to disassociate themselves from that. There are various games that are produced using "heavily modified versions" or, as in the case of Dodgy Geezers and Terrormolinos, where the Quill was used to develop the game on before it was "recoded".

The draw for me at the time for a game like Terrormolinos was the impressive graphics. When you play the game, it's pretty Quill-like. But hey, it's a text adventure, The Quill parser is fine, what else do you need? Simple and effective.

I never recalled adventure gamers being dismissive about Quill-made games so yes, perhaps 'programmer pride'... Interesting that I suppose in later times adventure game engines, particular point & click ones, became quite popular (e.g. SCUMM) and nobody batted an eyelid. I think it became more apparent that the quality in this sort of game comes from the atmosphere and puzzles. (Rather than hunger, thirst and darkness anyway!)

[Jbizzel]

Fascinating research and analysis - thank you.

[catventure]

Hi,
I'm a big fan of text adventures and Quill/PAW games.
Agreed - it is Interesting about the "ballpoint"- so thanks for this topic.

I'm still occasionally searching to locate the advert I discovered and copied from some old text adventure magazine for a Quill add-on called "The Enhancer". Unfortunately, I accidentally deleted the image file by mistake and then later could not remember where on earth I had seen the advert...!!
The advert definitely existed though and it WAS for "The Enhancer". Added new commands to Quill.
All I can remember was it was a block ADVERT in an Xmas or New Year issue of some old mag online (might have been disk mag) around 1990. May not even have been an 8-bit magazine either!
I would welcome If anyone has any knowledge of it, or purchased it or can provide the advertisement.
Although I have tried hard and done a lot of searching over the last 2 years - I have never came across it again.
Please keep in mind and If you come across any info please post here.
If we can find the seller address on the ad - there may be a copy of this utility still existing.

Thanks,
catventure.

[8BitAG]

Just a note to say that The Ballpoint in the archives has now been confirmed as a version of the Smart Egg "system" by Harvey Lodder, as he was the one who donated it.

[catventure]

Great stuff! Thanks for update and the solution to the mystery.

[8BitAG]

As I've posted on other channels, I imagine that what is in the archives as The Ballpoint is just a section of the Smart Egg system... As it's basically just a hacked-about Quill C, it seems likely that it was just used by the authors to create a Quill-like database that was probably loaded into something else (or even hand modified) where the compression, graphics code & custom interpreter was added... Their equivalent of the Patch/Press/Illustrator. Perhaps it even had it's own codename... The Stamper?

There are still a lot of unknowns. Presumably they had a system for getting the database across to the C64 and Amstrad CPC for those versions.

[druellan]

Just a note to say that The Ballpoint in the archives has now been confirmed as a version of the Smart Egg "system" by Harvey Lodder, as he was the one who donated it.

Can this be added as an alias and a note to the The Ballpoint entry?

[druellan]

I'm still occasionally searching to locate the advert I discovered and copied from some old text adventure magazine for a Quill add-on called "The Enhancer". Unfortunately, I accidentally deleted the image file by mistake and then later could not remember where on earth I had seen the advert...!!
The advert definitely existed though and it WAS for "The Enhancer". Added new commands to Quill.

I was taking a look on the magazines archived on arvhive.org, there are many "Enhancers", still nothing for The Quill, but here is the link: https://archive.org/search.php?query=%2 ... 22&sin=TXT

[catventure]

Hi druellan,

Thanks for your reply. I have found nothing also using their search facility.
Someday I hope to re-find it though.
All I can remember is that it was in a supplemental or extra adventure ads section for the New Year near the end of the mag - but cannot remember the mag title or year. Size is about 3" x 3" square. Feeling it was a a paper-based adventure dedicated fanzine/mag, possibly 1990-ish.
Oh well - maybe it will resurface one day.

catventure.