Alice through the VDU
Creating (and solving) adventures
A NUMBER of people wrote in to The Micro User to tell M.B. Hollands
(Micromail, October) how to deactivate the robot in Countdown
to Doom.
The answer is to "write steep, read flat" the message:
SEDLRAZIEOYZSTBFTAHOLOBET
on the artifact. That is, put it in a five by five matrix.
To save you the trouble of decoding it, the answer is:
UP*EJTBCMF*UIF*SPCPU*TBZ*GMFAA
Of course, I've had to encode this by shifting up the letters
one place in the alphabet. The * simply stands for a space.
This is far simpler to decode than the algorithm I gave to encode
where to find the Pirate's Chest in Colossal Cave. Which do you
prefer - or would you prefer not to have answers published at
all, but more clues?
Some of you have got stuck in other parts of this adventure.
I haven't got a listing but having looked at the other three
Acornsoft games, I'm sure this one can be broken in similar fashion.
However I appreciate not everyone can afford a lineprinter so
here are some of your Countdown problems:
Where are the crystals and the monster? Is there anything under
the swamp? How can you stop the floating platform from following
you ?
Even with a listing, this last problem appears to be quite difficult
and I will deal with such problems later.
There were some critical letters. A. Ashton warns that the BBC
version of Hobbit, although the same price as other versions,
is text only.
Actually I haven't been very impressed with graphic adventures
so far. They tend to be rather tedious as you wait for the usually
inanimate picture (which can cost a thousand words) to be drawn.
It is also quite impossible to represent some scenarios such
as: "You are in a vast hall stretching into the distant gloom.
Wisps of vapour dance as though they were alive. A little dwarf
appears, curses and throws an axe at you. It misses".
An interesting letter came from David Hampton: Dear Alice,
I read your review of six adventure programs with great interest.
Adventure players need articles like this because it's very hard
to tell how good they are until you've spent some time playing
them.
May I suggest, however, that you have another think about how
to judge adventures. Please don't assume games that SAVE quickly
are not complex. It only takes a few bytes to say which room you're
in, and so on.
I'm all for structure, but it does make programs larger. So
the best way to judge an adventure is to ask how many moves it
takes to complete, how many rooms it has and, most important of
all, how much text there is in the room descriptions and messages.
The reason I'm giving you all this brotherly advice is that
you will doubtless review my own adventure soon - vital statistics
105 rooms, approximately 290 moves and 23k of compressed text.
I want to make sure you appreciate "Title Deleted" fully!
Oh yes — on expletives — you're a prude, Alice!
A bit of praise, a bit of humble criticism and a bit of publicity
- well thanks Big Brother but, in my humble experience, the shorter
the SAVE the poorer the game, but I will continue to judge mainly
on the listing - if I can get one.
As for structure, it is also my experience that a badly laid
out program tends to have more bugs. There are techniques for
writing a program so you can understand it yourself, and then
altering it so that cheats like myself find it almost impossible
to unravel.
A simple trick is to use meaningful identifiers and then reduce
them to a single letter when that part of the program is working.
Another technique is to have the program compiled, but this
tends to make it bigger. Of course the best way is to compress
the messages as in Level 9's A-code (as Hampton appears to have
done).
I wholly agree that an adventure should inform the potential
buyer about the number of rooms, puzzles, size, whether text or
not, and also give some measure of how difficult the games is
in terms of moves and/or time.
But this is still not sufficient to judge its appeal. Obviously
this is a subjective opinion but there are now at least 10 books
on the market which "teach you how to create your own exciting
adventure".
Countless magazine articles also deal with the subject, and
now Gilsoft has issued The Quill which "allows even the novice
programmer to produce high speed machine code adventures of superior
quality - without any knowledge of machine code".
This advert reminds me of the famous machine in the Ladogan
Academy (see Gulliver's Voyage to Laputa by Jonathan Swift) with
which "the most ignorant person ... may write books in philosophy,
poetry, politics, law, mathematics and theology without the least
assistance from genius or study".
Swift was satirising a machine which actually did exist at the
time.
The prospect of more adventures being written by novices is
not good news because, even now, half the programs I get to review
are so lacking in originality that I want to stop up my nostrils
with tobacco and refuse to even mention their titles.
All that these books, magazine articles and The Quill have done
so far is help the reader with the mechanics of designing and
handling a fairly simple dynamic database, and I am irritated
when they claim to tell you everything you need to know.
You. might just as well buy a book that will teach you how to
write a symphony.
It is often said that reviewers are barren, destructive old
maids. We who ourselves cannot create take delight in criticising
those trying to earn an honest buck.
To a certain extent this is true. The more games one tries the
more unlikely and difficult it is to be excited or amused, and
this breeds a certain arrogance.
For example, I am quite confident that I could write a better
adventure than most products on the market but I'm not going to
until I get a firm contract, money in advance and a guaranteed
hype in full colour in all the magazines.
The result would not have the slightest shred of originality
because Barbara Cartland does very well with her efforts which
are junk compared to Shakespeare, Swift, Dickens and Joyce.
Who wants to read Finnigan's Wake from beginning to end every
month when a cheap bodice-ripper will pass a few pleasant hours?
Being a successful adventure writer means you must hack in a
junk market. A good gimmick, a few puzzles and a technicolour
advert is how to really collect the treasure.
A gimmick is something "designed to attract attention and
publicity", so first ask yourself - how is your game going
to be different?
How about an electric shock every time the player gets it wrong?
Not likely to sell to kids or old age pensioners.
How about a treasure hunt? Already done in Pimania — you need
a sponsor, it cuts down the profits and is dead when someone is
even suspected of having solved it.
How about lifting the plot of a book? Now that's a good gimmick
because there are thousands of books but they mostly have a fixed
plot.
How about an educational adventure like building a hydrogen
bomb? Well, there's a thought - after all the first problem ever
run on the Eniac computer in 1946 was to help design a more efficient
atomic bomb.
The point is that ninety per cent of adventures are just so
many rooms, so many objects, so much "do this, do that, do
the other" until you can pass an obstacle.
It's all been done before, and mazes are boring unless, like
Acornsoft, you can come up with a couple of new twists to solving
them.
All adventures should have puzzles. You don't have to be to
original, in fact rather the opposite. Take Gollum's riddle in
The Hobbit:
"What walks on four legs in the morning, two in the afternoon
and three in the evening?" - That one is as old as the Sphinx
but the real answer, nowadays, is Jake the Peg (diddle iddle iddle
um) because a stick ain't a leg.
However, as I said, the paradox of puzzles is the older they
are the better, providing you can dress them up a bit.
You are in front of Aladdin's Cave. What should you say?
You find some charcoal and sulphur near the village rubbish
heap on which the peasants tend to urinate. Would you know what
to do?
You meet a poker player who invites you to take five cards from
his pack. He then draws five himself. You can now change any of
your cards; your discards are thrown away. The poker player may
now draw likewise and, if he has a better hand than yours then
he shoots you. Would you know how to win every time?
The answer won't be in the listing for this one obviously, and
there are thousands of similar puzzles, but the trouble is that
they can be quite tricky to program.
Finally the toughest problem - selling your work. Pick a reputable
software house and send a sample program plus an explanatory solution.
I actually get the occasional program to referee and become
irritated if I don't also get a clear description of what is original
in the game, what the solutions are plus a map and a listing.
The reviewer and possible distributor are mainly concerned with
assessing the game's market value and not in admiring your ingenuity
by trying to solve it.
There was a time when I enjoyed solving any old adventure, but
the fun wears thin after wrestling with some yahoo program. The
hardest to solve are often the worst, badly written, full of random
numbers, dead ends, irrelevant rooms and objects, no story line,
poor clues and rotten puzzles.
Occasionally I might be intrigued enough by the listing to actually
play a game just to see how quickly I can break it.
For example, I liked the look of Gateway to the Skies by Solar
Software and spent about five hours on the listing before actually
running it.
It is a pleasant program to cheat your way through because the
author has laid out the rooms, their descriptions, directions
and objects contained in a very clear and readable way — it's
a model of how to write such programs.
The author has also put in the neat gimmick of having his adventure
in two sections. You have to collect the right objects in the
first section before you turn the cassette over and start the
second half.
To make the second half work you need to know a password which
will create a special SAVE file in the first half. This is a new
idea to me so I had to try it.
There are about 100 rooms, 50 objects and 30 puzzles in the
game and the idea of splitting it into two parts works very well.
You get the equivalent of a Level 9 game without having to cram
the machine with the compressed tangle David Hampton seems to
advocate.
I expect to see many more two-part games — you get a good long
run for your money this way.
Just to prove I am not a barren old maid, I have written an
adventure for you lot to knock — it's called Judgement Day and
picks up where most adventures finish.
Anyone can try to solve it. You don't even need a computer because
you have the complete listing and it's less than 50 lines long.
But - so you can fully appreciate it -the gimmick is that the
answers are not in the program.
What you have to find is a set of commands which guarantee you
can always open Porta Coeli - you've got to be able to do it every
time.
There is a prize for the best answer, and I would also be interested
in any similar mini-adventures readers can create.
Keep them less than 100 lines, put them on tape, give some idea
of the gimmick and the solutions and we might publish them — your
first step to fame and fortune.
Finally, it's no good writing long letters about how you are
stuck in a game. You should keep the query short and to the point,
for example: Wizard and Princess by On-Line. How do I cross the
chasm? A.Lamport, 99 Bushy Mill Crescent, Watford WD2 4RB.
This should get an answer, but despite the flattery the following
won't: Castle of Riddles by Acornsoft. I think I've got everything,
so how do I finish? P.S. Your magazine is great.
Alice
