A NEW WAY OF WRITING ADVENTURES.

Over a years development work has gone into INCENTIVE's adventure-writing utility. The Graphic Adventure Creator, and it has already appeared for the Amstrad, earning a very favourable response. The Spectrum adventure-writing utility market is still dominated by The Quill - can GAC step in as the new king? Sean Masterson takes a close look, and rustles up a couple of comments from the Crash crew…

The Graphic Adventure Creator is a sophisticated adventure writing package that arrives on a single cassette. Adventures written with the package include multiple commands in a single input, advanced graphics, full word recognition and a host of other features intended to make this the state-of- the-art adventure writing utility.

The packaging is very neat. GAC comes in a large format cassette holder complete with a glossy manual. The printing isn't remarkable but the manual explains every detail of the utility with care and precision sometimes with accompanying graphics where it is thought they may help. Loading is achieved easily thanks to use of fast loading techniques and the user is presented with a title/credit screen followed by a menu page. GAC itself leaves approximately 23K free for your adventure once it resides in memory, but larger adventures could be created with multiple loading techniques this should mean that the adventure can be as big as the author desires. Complete adventures run independently of the utility.

To give you an idea of just what this package is capable of, INCENTIVE include a couple of mini adventures with the package. One is a pure text offering, the other uses graphics. If the full solution to an example adventure is known, the entire game may be played in one input. The result is like a short story, punctuated with a series of commands and it forms an impressive demonstration of GAC's power. There is also a Quickstart file which loads a group of common verbs, conditions and other details to allow rapid creation of small games or time to be saved when commencing larger works.

As the graphics capability is the most obviously powerful aspect of the utility, let's begin with a look at the graphics creation routines... As with any utility of this type, the more complex the graphics, the less memory is available for the rest of the adventure. While this might suggest the need for simplistic graphics, INCENTIVE have made sure that the adventure writer has the opportunity to make up complex images should they be required. Block or line graphics may be implemented with ease, and a host of devices have been included to make the process as painless as possible.

Four pure colours may be used in an illustration, though these may be stippled in any combination to give the effect of up to ten colours and textures on screen. Bright and flash options are also provided.

The top two thirds of the graphic creation screen is surrounded by the frame in which the image is created. Below this, the pen and paper symbol are permanently displayed along with the border colour. The pen rests on the paper during the drawing process for clarity during picture creation. Unfortunately the options menu is not displayed (as it is on the Amstrad version of GAC) which means serious study of the manual is required until the commands become second nature. This is my only gripe.

The drawing routines supplied cater for all needs. Elipses, Dots, Boxes, Fill and Shade, slow and fast drawing, picture merging, and picture or stage deletion are all included along with a picture scan that allows analysis and alteration of any stage in the creation. An attribute grid showing possible problems due to the Spectrum's colour limitations is also available as a screen overlay.

The merging facility is very important from a memory saving angle. If a picture is drawn and then has a frame decoration added (previously drawn as a separate picture), only three bytes are used. This cuts down tremendously on memory used if repetitive pictures are used.

Most of the features work smoothly but the exception to this neatness is the Fill command. This isn't perfect and an optimum position within the area to be filled needs to be found. Even then, in an awkward shape, a gap may be left. This can be rectified by implementing Fill a second time from a better position and the final result will be no different from that achieved with a more capable command routine. However, the finished picture takes up more memory. This is arguably offset by the fact that this Fill command takes up very little memory itself and is particularly fast. On the final picture, it makes no real difference anyway.

The ability to look back or delete back either a single step or a whole picture makes correction and modification of pictures very simple indeed. The effect of open or closed doors is just one example of how these features cater for the kind of conditions often required of graphics in adventures. Because it is possible to change the ink during the course of a picture creation and then change it back again, when the whole picture is asked for in the adventure, a limited form of animation is possible. Things such as flashing lights, flowing water or other relatively small changes to detail to a picture can be attained with the minimum of effort.

Up to 10,000 separate pictures can be held in a GAC game, though it's extremely unlikely that more than a fraction of this number would actually be used. Because of the way pictures are tied to locations it's possible to have small pictures created as inserts, displaying recently acquired objects for instance. The potential for experimentation is enormous.

As is the case with most other adventure writers, GAC allows up to 255 words to be defined as part of the adventuring vocabulary. As full word recognition is catered for in GAC, shortened versions of words (such as EXAM for EXAMINE) have to be created as synonyms by giving them the same numerical value in the vocabulary table. This does, however create the opportunity for more diversity and flexibility. One aspect of GAC which is slightly unusual is that unlike The Quill, words are stored alphabetically instead of numerically. This means the vocabulary has continuity, but synonyms are harder to locate while editing.

Up to 765 words can be used,255 each of nouns, verbs and adverbs. The section 'Adverbs' actually includes prepositions, so the label is an arbitrary rather than a linguistic one! However, this allows for detailed analysis of each line of player input and consequently, greater flexibility in terms of acceptable player response.

The interpreter is the real gem in GAC. If you have ever wanted to create LEVEL 9 style adventures but have been held back by the limitations of The Quill or lack of programming ability, then this where GAC can solve your problems. Commands are not limited to verb/noun input or single command per sentence input. Instead, a whole series of commands may be entered so long as the adventure author has taken full advantage of the very sophisticated parser. Multiple commands may be punctuated by 'AND', 'THEN', '.' or ',' in any fashion the author requires.

'IT' recognition is also possible if IT is made object number 255. This way it always refers to the last noun mentioned. This allows commands such as GET THE LAMP THEN LIGHT IT to be used. As mentioned earlier, the best part about the parser is the fact that commands may be as long as the player likes. If an error is made part way through the command (such as trying to get an object that isn't there), the rest of the command is ignored.

Another area where GAC excels is with the conditions. GAC uses High, Low and Local priority conditions to set up certain events under particular circumstances, GAC checks a High condition before the player has the opportunity to make an input. Checking whether a lamp is switched on can be made a High condition, which governs whether the player can see in a dark location.

Local conditions are those that only apply in a particular room or situation. If you left an airlock without a space suit for example and the author had taken full advantage of the condition facilities, GAC would check for a spacesuit and kill you before you could do anything else. Low priority conditions are checked in the same way as local ones except that they are not confined to individual rooms. They might check that you were carrying an object, simply to ensure a message continued to appear.

GAC has more flexibility than any other adventure writing utility I have seen because of the vast numbers of counters and markers it has. One obvious example of this flexibility is the ability to give objects and then allow a player to carry a maximum weight. This is far more desirable than just allowing a certain number of objects to be carried regardless of how massive or miniscule they may be.

Clever use of the 255 messages allowed - breaking them down into commonly use segments - saves memory and increases the apparent number of messages in the adventure. This technique is not exclusive to GAC but it is reassuring to see that such things are possible nevertheless.

Editing any part of a GAC adventure is simplicity itself. Everything is well explained in the excellently written manual and all the different parts of GAC are accessed from a main menu. The whole effort has been logically devised. One great advantage is that you can do anything from the main menu - loading separate programs to add graphics is now something of the past.

Though the package sells at a price that can hardly be called cheap, all things are relative. When you compare this to the competition, both in terms of price and performance, it comes out way on top. Future, more powerful versions are planned (which may allow redefinable character sets) but this should not put you off getting hold of a copy as soon as possible, as any future version will be a while off yet.

GAC has already set a new standard on other micros. INCENTIVE have learned from the odd shortcomings of earlier versions, and Spectrum owners benefit from modifications made in the light of INCENTIVE'S earlier experience. The response to this product should be extraordinary. Before rushing off part with your money, take a peek at the News Page in this issue, where there should be details of a money-saving offer!

My first experience with GAC was a pleasure. Just a quick look at the manual allows you to immediately design a simple adventure, and after the little features of GAC are sorted out you could spends months designing the adventure of your dreams. The package is extremely flexible, and if you don't feel like doing some of the work, like defining all your words, then GAC will help out. The thing that makes GAC so attractive is that you don't need to have any idea of programming at all. The only thing you need is an idea of what how your adventure is to work. It is then just a simple case of telling the program how the locations are linked aft then supplying messages and conditions - you can even have pictures to help the story along. I was amazed to see that INCENTIVE have managed to include an art package in with the price. This contains some very complex features: like elastic elipses, scanning through the drawing of the picture, and proper deleting of more than the last thing you drew. The adventures that can be produced should rank among the cleverest on the market. If you'd always thought that you would play adventures if you could find the right one-then you have no excuse any more - write your own!. GAC is the most powerful adventure creator on the Spectrum ever, an adventure processor rather than a cumbersome adventure assembler

When it comes to writing adventures without learning machine code, GAC and The Quill can both look foreboding to first time users. GAC's advantage lies in the fact that an entire adventure may be created without the need for loading up different programs or buying add-ons to the basic package. The one thing need to remember is that no matter how good the utility is, you will not create good games unless you have the imagination to write something exciting and fun, and have the desire to get the best from the program. Playing an adventure written on GAC for the first time is quite an experience. Being able to input multiple commands (in fact, entire paragraphs). Gives you a sense of freedom and power. When it comes to writing an adventure you don't feel as if the limitations of the program will get in your way. The knowledge that after a while, you might come out with something like The Price of Magik makes you want to learn more about the system. Once you have built up a little enthusiasm, coming to gee with the package is easy. And it's a lot more flexible and fulfilling than The Quill. The graphic facilities are excellent but a bit more on-screen help would not have come amiss. At first, most of my time was spent flipping through the instruction manual trying to figure out how to actually draw a line on the screen. Fortunately the manual is well written. I can't wait to see the first few commercial adventures written on GAC. The Quill is dead. Long live GAC!'

FAX BOX
Title: The Graphic Adventure Creator
Publisher: Incentive Software Ltd
Price: £22.95

Having seen the Amstrad version of this brilliant utility, looking at the preproduction Spectrum version provided by Incentive was like greeting an old friend. It has so many features that we've decided to give it a two-part review, the second part coming next month when we hope the finished product will be ready to fill in a few gaps. One gap in GAC as yet is the amount of memory that will be available to you, and that should be in the region of 22/23K according to Incentive. The 'true' size of an adventure written using GAC will be much larger as the program incorporates compression routines. By way of illustration, Incentive's own Ket Trilogy will fit comfortably into the GAC system and leave several K left over, and that's not a tiny adventure.

GAC is menu driven, the opening screen allowing single-key access to options such as Nouns, Verbs, Graphics, Messages and so on. You'll need to do a considerable amount of planning before attempting an adventure, and we'll deal with the way to approach this next time. For now we'll try to familiarise you with some of the features.

The text side deals with full-sentence input of nouns, verbs and adverbs. The parser picks each out, so the DROP THE ELEPHANT CAREFULLY and CAREFULLY THE ELEPHANT DROP would both be understood. A 'Quickstart' file is provided and that enters all the common commands for you, like NORTH, SOUTH, GET, WHAT NOW? and ending and saving routines.

Printing the location description, linking it to a picture number (if any) and interpreting the input are fairly simple, but you'll have to be careful with the three types of conditions which control what goes on in the adventure. High priority conditions happen immediately after the location description is printed, before any player input, so that if you arrive in the bull-ring while carrying the red handkerchief the death routine is called up. Local conditions happen in that location after the player's input, assuming the input wasn't an acceptable movement command. For instance, if you throw the axe it kills the dwarf, and if you don't throw the axe the dwarf kills you. Finally come the more routine low priority conditions, such as acting on inputs like GET, SCORE and so on.

A typical way of entering a low priority condition would be: IF (VERB 8 AND NOUN 1 AND CARR 5) DROP 5 OKAY END. That simply means that if the player typed in DROP LAMP, which you've designated as verb 8 and noun 1 respectively, and he's carrying the lamp (object 5) then drop the lamp, print Okay and wait for the next command. If you wanted to drop the lamp to produce an explosion that kills the player then instead of OKAY END you might enter MESS 216 EXIT END. Message 216 would be the message explaining what happens when the lamp's dropped and EXIT takes you out of the game. END tells the interpreter to stop there and not bother to look through the other conditions.

I'll look at how to approach the writing of an adventure using GAC next month. Meanwhile, if you were thrilled by The Quill then it's safe to say you'll be taken aback by the GAC. This all-in-one package will be the source of some impressive adventures in several month's time, I'm convinced of it.

Label: Incentive
Price: £22.95
Memory: 48/128K
Reviewer: Gary Rook

At last it seems there's some real competition for The Quill.

Incentive Software has converted its Graphic Adventure Creator, originally on the Amstrad, over to the Spectrum and, while it's not exactly cheap at £22.95, don't forget that what you're getting for that price is the equivalent of Gilsoft's Quill, Patch and Illustrator combined.

As with the Gilsoft suite, the idea of Graphic Adventure Creator is to provide a machine-code utility program which provides the framework for producing an adventure. It handles the mechanics, leaving you to concentrate on the plot, locations, objects and description.

To really do a program of this complexity justice could take weeks, but from what I've been able to see so far, Incentive has a winner here.

It's effectively a direct conversion from the Amstrad program. On first loading, you are presented with a menu. You have a number of choices: you can define a room description, you can create a graphic screen, you can specify how the rooms in your adventure link up, what the objects are and where they can be found, what messages the player gets after entering a room, or performing an action. Everything you need to write your own adventure.

The two main parts of the program are the picture designer program - which works just like a simplified graphics package - and the program to set up the network of locations and text for the adventure.

I must admit that I spent most of the time playing with the graphics creator, which is great fun. You get a window which takes up about half the screen, and a wide range of commands; you can draw lines, rectangles and elipses, as well as make dots on the screen, and you have a choice of colours - black, white, red, green, blue, purple, yellow and cyan. There are also another two special commands, one is transparency, so you get whatever the Paper colour is, and the other seems to reverse whatever colour you're drawing a line across, so if you have a white area next to a black area, the line would be black on white, then automatically change to white on black. The other half of the program is the code which allows the creation of the adventure framework itself. The Graphic Adventure Creator allows you to define just about everything you can possibly think of - certainly more than enough to create very complex adventures.

Saying which rooms link up and how is only the beginning: you will want to add riders (or conditions). For example, one room could be dark and players would need a lit lamp to enter it. Graphic Adventure Creator lets you set up the logical tests necessary to check if the player has satisfied each stage of the conditions. In this case the player must have previously picked up the lamp and given the command to light it and be in the dark room before getting the room description.

Whilst if you want you can have complete control over what is found where, and what messages the player gets and when, you can also opt to make use of the 'Quickstart' data which Incentive gives you.

This is a block of code which you can load into give you a solid base of commonly found verbs and messages. It will save you an awful lot of time removing much of the mundane routine command setting in each adventure you build.

As well as the Graphic Adventure Creator itself and the 'Quickstart' data two other programs are included on the reverse of the tape (just as on the Amstrad version). These are Advin Man, a package demonstrating some of the techniques of creating an adventure, and Ransom, which is an actual playable adventure, written using the Creator.

Finally, if the Graphic Adventure Creator is as popular on the Spectrum as it has been on the Amstrad - and it deserves to be - then Incentive hopes to produce commercially a range of adventures, called the Medallion series, written using it. These will be the pick of the programs sent in by people who have bought the system and used it.

The obvious comparison is with the Quill suite - if anything Graphic Adventure Creator is easier to use and offers more or less equal power.

SUPPLIER: Incentive Software
MACHINE: Spectrum 48K
PRICE: £14.95

Incentive's excellent adventure creator utility, released originally for the Amstrad, has made its promised appearance on the Spectrum. A conversion of Sean Ellis's original program, by Brendan Kelly, this has the same easy editing facilities. (See review, C+VG January 1986.)

The Spectrum, of course, is quite a different beast from the Amstrad, but within the constraints of the machine, this version faithfully reproduces the original.

A graphic creator option is included, and uses a similar method to that of its predecessor. As before, the game can be play tested from within the program, and includes a debugging aid.

A Quickstart file can be loaded, which sets up common verbs, messages, and low priority conditions associated with them. Two demonstration adventures are recorded on the reverse of the tape, one of which can be used to practice editing.

Up to 9999 locations can be created, and filled with up to 255 objects. 25S is also the maximum limit for verbs, nouns, adverbs, and markers, whilst up to 127 counters holding a maximum value of 255 can be used.

The actual number and mix of each of these achievable in practice, is, of course, determined by the memory limit of the machine. Free memory is constantly monitored on the main menu, and powers up at 23194 bytes.

Commodore 54 owners have yet to see the release of their version, but it is well on its way.

Incentive Software
£22.95

Once in a while a programming utility appears which makes a major impact on the games-writing world, and undeniably The Quill was one of them. It opened up the art of adventure writing so that anyone with the necessary patience and imagination could turn out a professional and polished game regardless of his or her programming ability. Of course it's true that a great number of Quilled adventures leave much to be desired, but the best of them (remember the superb Tower of Despair?) show just what can be achieved.

Although The Quill has dominated the adventure scene for some considerable time it does have its limitations, and now it has a serious competitor in the shape of The Graphic Adventure Creator, designed and written by Sean Ellis and Brendan Kelly for Incentive Software. You'll have seen the ads already: on paper the GAC looks very promising indeed, offering complex sentence analysis, multiple commands, text compression, a wide range of graphics facilities, and much ignore besides. What really counts, of course, is how it performs in use and the potential quality of the adventures you can write with it. At the time of writing this I've been beavering away with a copy for several days; this isn't long enough to completely master the program, but it's enough to get its measure. Quite simply, it's the most exciting utility I've encountered for some considerable time. It isn't without flaws, and it does suffer from its own inevitable limitations, but there is no doubt that the GAC has enormous potential for the budding adventure writer.

GETTING STARTED

The GAC package includes the Adventure Creator itself, plus a useful "Qulckstart" data file, a sample mini-adventure and, as might be expected for a utility which offers so much, a fairly lengthy instruction manual. I'd recommend several readings of the manual before you even load in the program. There are a few points which remain obscure, giving rise to much head-scratching when you're using the program, but virtually all you need is in there - it's just a matter of finding it! Unfortunately there are no instructions for transferring the program to disc or microdrive, and neither are we told where an alternative character set could be safely stored in memory - two pieces of information which many users will very sensibly require it's not difficult to sort this out yourself - but personally I don't see why you should have to be put to this trouble.

On loading the program itself you're presented with a comprehensive menu of options, and if you're wise your first choice will be to load in the "Quickstart" data file which is provided on the cassette following the main program. This gives you a useful base from which to start work, as it contains a basic vocabulary of common verbs which all adventures need (GET, INVENTORY, LOOK, EXAMINE and so on) together with a set of basic system messages without which the program can't operate (YOU CANT, WHAT NOW?, YOU ARE CARRYING etc.). All of these can be edited as much as you like.

Vocabulary is added to the program in three separate files for VERBS, NOUNS and ADVERBS (yes folks, ADVERBS!), a process which is made admirably simple by the excellent editing facilities. Each verb, noun, or adverb is assigned a number between 1 and 255, and synonyms are catered for by assigning the same number to each synonym. The ability of the program to recognise adverbs (or adjectives) as such represents an advance on The Quill, since it allows you to distinguish between commands such as EXAMINE THE BOX and EXAMINE THE BOX CAREFULLY. (Personally I view this with some misgivings - I foresee a spate of games whose solution depends entirely on the correct use of obscure adverbs!)

Entering location descriptions and messages is sheer delight. Gone are the days of fiddling about with your text to get it formatted correctly on screen. You can just bash in your text as it comes, ignoring the effect of words breaking at the ends of lines, since GAC sorts all this out for you when the adventure is running, word-wrapping where necessary. That's the good news. The bad news (which caused me much loss of temper) is that it doesn't always work properly! Although it's standard practice when typing to leave a space after a punctuation mark, the program doesn't seem to know this and fails to cope with it when punctuation marks fall at the end of a line. The result can be a messy, irregular left hand margin, necessitating either a fresh editing of your text description or the omission of the obligatory space as a matter of course (which gives the text a rather cramped appearance). Neither is really satisfactory.

At every stage the program prompts you in an intelligent manner. After completing a location description, for example, you are asked to enter the connections between this and adjoining locations. If going north would take you to location 15 for example, this is simply entered as NORTH 15 - and in this way the map of your adventure world can be built up quite painlessly. Modifications can be made with great ease.

LOGIC

Once your basic text descriptions, messages, map, objects and so on have been entered, it's time to start building up the logic of your adventure. This is where the real strengths of this program become apparent, and it's also where things can get rather difficult. There are basically three types of conditional actions available, the files for each type being separately accessible from the main menu. High priority conditions are checked before the player types a command, low priority ones are checked after his command is entered, and local conditions refer to events which take place in specific locations. The logical operators available for all this are so extensive that it would take considerable time to explore their potential fully, and I can't pretend to have done more than scratch the surface so far. 255 flags or "markers" are provided so that you can keep track of important events (such as whether doors are locked or unlocked) together with the means for testing just about everything you'll ever want to test - weights of objects, whether objects are present, carried, or in some specified room. This is all accomplished using a simple language - well explained in the manual - whic is used to describe both conditions (entered in brackets) and subsequent actions.

One specific example should illustrate the power of the program here. In the little adventure I wrote to test GAC, the player encounters Nasty Nick the burglar, who is armed with a gun. On typing TELL NICK TO GIVE ME THE GUN, the player needs to be given an appropriate message, and to have the gun (which in fact I doesn't yet 'exist' as an object) added to his list of possessions. The condition line needed for this was:

IF (VERB 24 AND NOUN 3 AND NOUN 5 AND RES? 6 AND HERE 3) SET 6 MESS 6 5 TO 3 GET 5 END

Roughly translated(!) this means: if the player's command contains the verb "tell" (24) and nouns "Nick" (3) and "gun" (5). If flag 6 is reset, and if Nick is present (HERE 3), then set flag 6 (so that this action can occur only once), print a suitable message (MESS 6), create the gun in this location (5 TO 3) and put it in the player's inventory (GET 5).

Multiple commands work beautifully without any special effort on the part of the writer, and "IT" is automatically understood to mean the last noun used.

As long as each separate command has already been programmed, a sentence like "UNLOCK THE DOOR, OPEN IT AND GO IN" is easily adapted, with each command being executed in turn. The only notable omission is "DROP ALL" and "GET ALL" which, sadly, are not catered for.

GRAPHICS

Adventures can be written to incorporate graphics, of course, and any pictures can be turned on or off at will when the finished adventure is played. The pictures are drawn in a window which occupies the top two-thirds of the screen, which I thought was rather excessive. It leaves relatively little room below for text, and I found I often had to amend a location description to prevent the top lines scrolling out of view before they could be read. Facilities for drawing ellipses, rectangles, lines, dots, solid filling and shaded filling are all provided, together with very good editing facilities, and one of the screen shots here represents the result of my experiments with these. Not a masterpiece, I'm afraid - but it should give you some idea of the sort of thing you can turn out in half an hour or so, once the graphics commands are mastered. This picture takes up about 450 bytes. A help in this respect is the facility for merging pictures together, so that you could use a 'standard' tree for instance, stored as a picture on its own, and merge this whenever it's needed. The value of this feature is limited by the fact that the tree would have to be drawn in the same place every time in the graphics window - there's no facility for moving it about.

Overall the program is such a joy to use, and its potential so great, that my chief criticisms might seem like nit-picking. I've already mentioned the word-wrapping problem, but there are other rough edges which I'm sure could be very easily put right, and these do affect the polish of the final adventure that can be produced. The worst of these concerns the way in which inventories and objects are listed - instead of "You are carrying a gun, a hat, and a letter.", you actually get "You are carrying a gun, a hat, a letter" without a full stop at the end. I could ignore the omission of "and", but the omission of the full stop really does matter if a high priority message is printed immediately afterwards, giving rise to output like "You can see a letterNick arrives." You can fiddle a way around this (and I did so to produce the screen shot) but things can become rather messy. I also found it hard to get consistency in the printing of blank lines to space out the text pleasantly: an unconditional 'line feed' as a high priority instruction works most of then time - but not when you move between locations.

Finally, despite the claims for text compression in the current Incentive ads, I confess that I'm unable to find evidence for any such thing. Free memory is displayed constantly on the menu screen, and so it's easy to keep track of what's going on. If you type in, say, 500 characters of location descriptions, free memory seems to reduce by considerably more than 500 bytes! Am I missing something, I wonder? .

If you've never used an adventure generator before, then I suspect you'd find The Quill easier to use. Because The Quill attempts to do less, it's naturally easier to work with. But if you want to boldly go where no Quill has gone before, then the Graphic Adventure Creator must come very close to what you're probably looking for. Even as it stands, the program is a superb addition to the game writer's armoury; and if Incentive can sort out the minor presentational defects mentioned earlier, then it could very well prove unbeatable.