This program, consisting of 15K of pure machine code, allows the user to design graphics adventures using the displayed map. There are also extensive save facilities; created programs can be run without Dungeon Builder.

Alex: Adventure designers are not at all original, but this one has been very highly developed and should enable adventure programs to be created that are every bit as good as the user's imagination. I, for one, will be rushing out to buy one straight away. One of the most interesting features is the way you can produce your own screen graphics, and then use any of the Spectrum's colours. HIT

Alan G: It's a pleasure to use, with fast response times to your commands, complete freedom in things like graphics designing and choice of colours. The most valuable feature is the way it allows a complete adventure to run without Dungeon Builder being present. Also very good is the 100-page manual which explains clearly how to make the most of the package. HIT

Alan H: A utility that actually works quite well, but could have been better. It's similar to other programs like The Quill and Dungeon Master, coupled with a crude drawing program. The graphics take a good deal of time to produce, but they're pretty good when complete. Compared with other similar offerings, this one rates favourably, but overall appeal depends upon whether you like writing adventure programs. MISS

MERLIN'S RECIPE BOOK

To create a Dungeons and Dragons game can be as much fun as to actually play it. With programs such as THE QUILL by Gilsoft or DUNGEON BUILDER by Dream Software, very little programming knowledge is required. Let there be warning however that a logical and skilful mind is essential, as even the most simple detail of the program requires careful planning, if our hero, the player, is to stand a chance against the pitfalls and Dragons of the adventure. If you have a preference for graphical adventures, the Dungeon Builder is your comrade in arms. Discover the secret weapons at the reach of your fingertips...

The curious cassette box hides a 100-page manual containing hidden secrets and instructions and a single cassette loaded with the latest dungeon construction gear and dragon breeding equipment. The cassette also stores an hors d’example adventure to whet your appetite and to get you started on the right track..

The manual reads like Merlin's recipe book, advising you of the eight powerful menus at your disposal and introduces you to every single command feature with an example, which gradually allows you to build up a simple doorless two-chamber horror quickie to the most sophisticated multi-level dungeon mansion with all mods and cons such as self-locking doors and cliffs, trap doors and spiral staircases, secret passages and spacewarps, wall-to-wall treasures and blood curdling monsters...

The central playing ground is the Main Display Screen displaying a portion of a 40 x 40 cell map. Each cell is octagonal and represents a room with eight walls. A cursor pinpoints the editing location and the co-ordinates of every cell are displayed. In the upper right-hand corner is the memory gauge, indicating the amount of free bytes left. Below appear the various menus with command selections.

Upon selecting CREATE from the Outer Menu, all cells are restored with all walls intact and all objects destroyed. The basis of the system is to modify or knock out the walls of the cells, to create descriptions and if required screen pictures for the cells, create objects, etc. The player, all living beings, treasures, stairs, doors, keys, etc, are all treated as objects and must therefore be created individually. To any object is allocated a name, a score, a weight, a (starting) position, commands from the verblist to which it reacts and descriptions, when encountered in a room.

Several action commands may be allocated to one object, for example 'Open door' or 'Close door' and depending on the command taken, one of the following actions may be taken:

SAY: Prints a message, ie 'The door is locked'
DIE: Object is killed
MOVE: Moves the object to a new position (Any, Carried, Here, Select)
STATUS: Changes the status of the object (ie from closed to open)
JUMP: Causes player to move to a position specifIed.

For each status a different description of the object may be given. Each command recognised by an object increases the Verb List. Each command can be made dependent on a given condition and the action is to be specified.

This sounds all very complicated, but in fact is made very easy by the automatic prompting of the program. Depending on the previous action a new menu is displayed and makes sure that no logical errors occur.

Basically the creation may be subdivided into the following main activities:

- Create and modify the individual cells (Description, Screen Picture, Score, knock down or modify walls, etc.)

- Create and modify objects (Name, Description, Score, Commands, Position. Weight).

The commands recognised by the objects make up the Verb List. Since the command processor checks on the status of the object and various commands can be allocated to one object, multiple actions are made possible.

The cell walls are double-sided and may be broken through on one side only for access in one direction only. Conditional movement through a wall of the cell is possible, where the command processor makes the movement conditional to the status of an object, an open or closed door.

A wall of a cell may be made to react to the approach of the player, the action involving Say, Die, Move. Status or jump. With jump a spacewarp effect can be achieved, whereby the player will leave the room and appear at any given position on the map. Say will allow a message to appear when the wall is approached. For multi-level adventures it is necessary to create pseudo objects. These start with a dot and are therefore not printed on an Inventory or an entry into a room.

Stairs may be created as a pseudo object, which recognises up and down commands and acts accordingly. When in the middle of a cell, the menu asks for a description or picture. Selecting picture will activate the Picture Creator.

The facility includes apart from the usual paper and ink colour selection the drawing of lines and the painting of solid triangles. The cursor is controlled by the cursor keys (Caps shift for eight pixels per keystroke). Once completed the resulting picture will be displayed whenever the room is entered.

The unfinished program may be saved to cassette and reloaded. An excellent facility is provided for saving the completed adventure game in machine code, so that it can be loaded and played independently of Dungeon Builder.

In conclusion, the DUNGEON BUILDER is an excellent Graphic Adventure games creator, which simplifies the generation of even the most elaborate adventure and thus provides a possibility for the less expenenced programmer to create an adventure masterpiece.

BREATHING LIFE INTO FANTASY

Richard Price examines aids for adventures

After the last goblin has been offed or the top secret plans recovered from some rusty casket in the quicksands, do you sit back with a mild feeling of dissatisfaction and wonder whether you couldn't do just as well yourself?

Even if you can barely manage to program a nested loop in Basic it does not mean you cannot translate your feverish imaginings into electronic reality by creating your own adventure. You could be surprised to find your own game design is at least as exciting as a lot of the average and uninspiring offerings now on the market.

Don't kid yourself, though, that over a weekend you're going to churn out a program that will knock spots off the The Hobbit. Whether you write your programs or use tailor-made utilities, design and careful planning will require a great deal of time and paperwork before you even get started on the keyboard. Assuming you have a theme and a convincing setting the first priority will be a location map and its accompanying descriptions.

Drawing the map is a time-consuming process and it is best to use graph paper, leaving plenty of space between each box for notes, messages and so on. Print 'n' Plotter make a handy Adventure Chart with pre-drawn location boxes which should help simplify the task. The size of a large sketch pad has been produced primarily for players, but should be just as useful for games design.

Once a preliminary map is completed you will feel your fantasy world is taking shape. Adding descriptions will help put living flesh on those bare bones and, if the text is inventive, informative and atmospheric it will increase the game's playability enormously. Take a look at the superb Level 9 games to see how detailed text can add to the overall effect.

A word of warning - if you are a complete novice don't attempt a giant scenario with hundreds of locations. It's easier to practise on adventures with few locations and simple plots. Remember, too, that the Spectrum memory is limited and may not be able to cope with your dramatisation of War and Peace or the two thousand page Chronicles of Ganglewoop you have written in your spare time.

The next step is to work out all the likely interconnections between the locations, listing them meticulously. Objects and treasures - some obvious, some hidden - must be scattered around and you must decide what purpose they will have for the explorer of your world. It is probably that area of design which produces most difficulty as a game will stand or fall on the originality of its problems and puzzles. If they are too tough or obscure players are likely to give up in disgust. If they are too simple there will be little challenge or incentive to continue.

If you realise that a deduction problem will be impossible without help then put cryptic clues in the descriptions or the Help data. Anyone who has played Mountains of Ket will remember the magic word 'Polo' which gets you past the wall in 'mint condition'. Touches like that increase a program's attraction. Once again, you must keep track of all puzzles and the objects or conditions needed to solve them.

Next you face the task of developing the game vocabulary. It is essential to provide a variety of synonyms wherever possible. That increases versatility and should mean that players will not constantly see 'I can't do that' or similar reports on screen. It is occasionally useful to include an action which can be achieved only by a particular word combination but there is nothing more aggravating to the adventurer than searching through the entire Oxford English Dictionary for some obscure synonym.

Having created that large interlocking network of places, characters, objects and actions the major problem of getting your creation into the computer then pokes you in the eye. Don't panic. The market is well provided with books and programming utilities to help you. If you have little programming experience it is essential that you do some preparatory reading and practise. Many routines used in adventure are standard and, once learned, can be re-used time and again with new data.

Not all books on adventure programming are as useful as they may claim on the back cover. One of the simplest and clearest is Write Your Own Adventure Programs from Osbourne. Jenny Tyler and Les Howarth have made no assumptions about their readership and write in an uncomplicated style, taking you step by step through the entire process. The book is not Spectrum-specific but includes a section showing all the necessary conversions into Sinclair Basic. ZX-81 owners will find that they also have not been forgotten. Like most other books it takes a model adventure as its base and uses pleasantly daft illustrations to demonstrate the various processes. At £1.99 the paperback is extremely good value and contains as much information as many of the more expensive tomes on the shelves. However, because it is not machine-specific it does not run a section on graphics - as if they mattered anyway.

Spectrum Adventures - Sunshine Books, £5.95 - by Tony Bridge and Roy Carnell is more sophisticated, more expensive. Like many of the large books it includes a history of the computer adventure whilst the main body of the book concentrates on the creation of a graphic adventure.

It is not to be recommended for beginners but if you want hints on the use of graphics it may prove useful. It contains information on combat sequences, in true Carnell D & D style, and has the full listing of a 48K game.

Adventures do not always stick to the preset location style. Robert Speel's paperback New Adventure Systems for the Spectrum - Fontana, £3.95 - gives listings and advice on a number of formats. Speel makes things easier by slicing up the programs into sections, each of which can be added to a foundation program. He tends to gloss over how the routines work and the use of Sinclair printer listings makes reading a bit daunting.

One of the best and most user-friendly guides is Peter Gerrard's Exploring Adventures on the Spectrum 48K - Duckworth, £6.95. The three sample programs are pure text games and the author discusses data handling concepts with clarity and some sympathy for those who wriggle in panic when phrases like 'numeric arrays' are bandied about.

As a general guide, beware of books which contain vast listings and precious little else. Those programs take time to type in and will not necessarily teach you much about the structures they use. Always go for books which provide adequate explanations.

If you are not prepared to devote the time required for developing programming skills you will have to obtain a commercial adventure-writing program.

The Quill is now justly famous and can produce machine-coded games of high quality and fast response. At £14.95 cheap it isn't but it offers the embryonic games designer a means of creating complex scenarios quickly and slickly without any programming knowledge at all. The program is menu driven and includes a comprehensive instruction booklet, and though the style is sometimes difficult it is worth persisting until you understand it.

Although a simple graphic set is included in the package The Quill is not intended for games needing complex graphics. You will find that there is room for about 30K of data, enough for lots of locations and fine detail. With imagination you will be able to make commercially viable adventures as others have done already - look at the software ads and you will see.

Dungeon Builder from Dream appears slightly more user-friendly than The Quill. It features a graphics capability using a sketch pad style to draw screens. The functions are manipulated by menus and the location map is shone on screen using a system of interconnecting cells. Regrettably, its available memory is quite limited - around 10K - and that is a disadvantage in creating large adventures.

The Dungeon Master - Crystal Computing - is a different kettle of fish. This game program allows you to create a monster-bashing scenario set in an underground labyrinth. All the hazards, treasures and options are predefined and give little scope for exercising your own imagination. You will not be able to use it to make standard text adventures but you should find it entertaining if you enjoy a bit of hacking and smashing.

It is often said that computer gaming is an essentially passive occupation, stunting the imagination and critical faculties. Anyone who has played adventure will know that to be an unjustified and sweeping generalisation. If you decide to go further and create your own adventures you will certainly extend your imaginative range and logical skills. You might even trawl a little brass on the way.

DON'T LOOK NOW, BUT YOU'VE BEEN HAD

Dream Software
48K Spectrum
£9.95

PLUNGE IN TO THIS DUNGEON

THE ALREADY obese Spectrum adventure market seems set to swell some more with the arrival of a neat new game generator from Dream Software. Like Gilsoft's highly rated Quill system The Dungeon Builder enables you to write your own machine-code adventures without any previous programming knowledge - but differs sharply in that it's designed to accommodate 4-colour graphics. Author Richard Parratt tells me that this has caused other publishing houses to show considerable interest. In fact (I'm told) Artic like the system so much they're using it to write their next batch of adventures.

Parratt based TDB on an earlier text interpreter written for a mainframe. It took approximately four months to complete and as you might expect it's menu-driven. An Outer Menu leads to an Edge Editing Menu, where you can define your map, and this in turn leads to Centre Editing Menu and Object Editing Menu, where you can script the locations and place the objects.

Three final menus, Verb, Position and Command then allow you to implement the machinery necessary to make your piece work.

STATUS

The main screen display is exceptionally clear. At the top is a status line indicating the amount of memory free for the game. Early issues of TDB offered around 10K of usable memory but mark 2 versions, identifiable by a fancy loading screen, boast a more healthy 13.5K. Be sure to check before you buy. Below this is a lattice of octagonal cells which correspond to the directions N, NE, SE, S, SW, W, and NW. This is your map. You've a total of 1600 cells to play with and breaking the links between them creates adjoining locations. The accompanying manual takes you through the process step by step.

Below the grid is the Design Menu which can be accessed using a key letter, Hit 'O' for open on the Edge Editing Menu, f'rinstance, and you'll be able to bulldoze a path between the cells with your cursor. Hit 'D' for describe and you'll be able to type in a description for the cell your cursor happens to occupy at the time. Curiously you're only permitted to enter one upper case letter per sentence. This is due to TDB's byte compression system. A worthwhile idiosyncrasy. Less tolerable though is the screen full of garbage that results from including a question mark in your descriptive text. When told of this elephantine bug the guys at Dream were suitably apologetic and promised to hold onto stocks until it had been exorcised. Owners of bugged Builders are advised to return to their cassettes (but not the expensive packaging) for replacement.

Having laid and scripted the game you're then required to establish conditions and consequences. This involves a modicum of intelligence and so temporarily baffled your humble scribe. An altogether inordinate amount of time was spent putting a door in one of the cell walls! I could open the blamed thing all right, but not close it; I never did find out what it was I was doing wrong.

GRAPHICS

Adding the graphics is less confusing. You just punch the 'P' option on the Centre Editing Menu, select a background colour and manipulate the drawing cursors with your trusty cursor keys. Instant masterpiece!

Your adventure is then completed by loading the saved database into the 'Make' utility on the cassette's flip-side. The thing gulps down the info, swills it around and regorges it as a genuine stand-alone adventure. Unfortunately it comes complete with a truly hideous loading screen that proclaims in bold type that the game was created on 'The Dungeon Builder'. It even gives Dream's full address! Decidedly OTT. I put this gripe to Richard Parratt who was understandably defensive. "It's all part of the protection device," he said, "although we would be quite happy to remove it if we could come to some sort of arrangement for an alternative credit."

Hmmph. Perhaps some of you wizard readers know of a faster solution? This and the question mark bug apart I found the whole system very impressive. Response time on the finished product is perhaps a bit sluggish but the graphics facility more than compensates. It also helps you avoid the factory-farming effect of The Quill. A microdrive version and users club are promised soon.

Dream's Dungeon Builder works in a rather different way to Gilsoft program. Instead of typing in your location descriptions one by one, the screen displays a huge grid of octagonal shapes, each one representing a location.

Using a keyboard you manoeuvre a cursor from one octagon to the next, and follow the different instructions presented to either enter text, remove walls (to create doors and passages), or edit locations.

The main advantages of this are first that you have a useful visual representation of your adventure 'map', and secondly that you don't have to enter the locations in any particular order. This does mean, however, that you have to be very disciplined in the way you make your entries, otherwise you can lose track of which rooms you put where.

The disadvantages of Dream's program compared to The Quill are the lack of available memory space on the Spectrum (only 10,000 bytes) and the slightly confusing manual which needs to be worked through very carefully to get the best from the program.

The memory won't be such a problem for 64 owners, however. What's more, there's a microdrive version coming out for the Spectrum that will enable you to get round the lack of space by saving different sections of your game onto tape.

However it's the graphics that are the biggest attraction of Dream's program. You can include a picture for any location if you wish, and since each line you draw takes up only 3 bytes of memory you can fit in a surprising amount. There's a special drawing aid included in the program, that allows you to draw line and 'fill' different areas with colour.

Even if you're not interested in drawing pictures, this is an important facility that will enable you to include maps, diagrams, and other visual elements in your game.

Once I'd mastered the manual, I found Dungeon Builder a joy to use. It doesn't have as many features as The Quill - no 'status flags', for example - but if you're clever you can use the facility for 'conditional commands' to get round this.

At £9.95 it's considerably cheaper than its main rival, and the added attraction of graphics makes it a very tempting package, especially if you can get hold of a Commodore 64 or microdrive version. If you want to market your games, Dream won't charge you any royalties providing you credit them on the packaging and in the program.

Gilsoft's Quill offers the Spectrum owner more space and more facilities, but no graphics. Dungeon Builder has graphics and is £5.00 cheaper. Both of these programs are excellent products and offer exciting possibilities to the imaginative adventurer.