Classic Adventure Game Creation Book Online 13
The classic computer site Atariarchives.org has managed to secure permission from the copyright holder to publish the text of Tim Hartnell's 1983-published Creating Adventure Games On Your Computer on their site. The system requirements for the actual programming may be a little harsh for many of you, though - you'll need a computer with Basic and at least 24K of RAM.
24k of ram? (Score:4, Interesting)
adventure games for my nokia, palm, etc. that
would be pretty neat. Someone with more motivation
than me could probably set up an interface with
java, perl, etc. on a website where you could
fill in the blanks and generate these things in
the proper file format for small handheld devices.
I miss some of the classic adventure games.
Re:24k of ram? (Score:2)
With those requirements... (Score:2)
Interactive Fiction Authoring Tools (Score:2, Informative)
Damn. (Score:3, Funny)
Ok, Let's see here....
24K of RAM - Check, I have 256MB... should be enough (for anyone!).
BASIC, hmmm..... (clicks XP start menu) er, ah crap.
Come back, Extended Color BASIC, all is forgiven! I miss my old COCO 2 sometimes
Re:Damn. (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyway, there's always SmallBASIC [sourceforge.net]. You can gosub to line numbers and everything, just like the old days. :)
Compatibility (Score:1)
Another introductory guide (Score:2, Insightful)
I could have sworn this is a dupe of a story about Tim Hartnell's book, but a cursory search isn't turning up anything. Maybe it was on ArsTechnica...
Anyway, if someone gets a hankering to write an adventure game in a (somewhat) more contemporary language, there's always Inform, the reverse-engineneered language that compiles down to the same z-code files that Infocom's games came in. The Inform Beginner's Guide, 2nd ed. [inform-fiction.org] is a great and free start, and the Inform Designer's Manual [inform-fiction.org] will answer any quest
Good times... (Score:1)
I remember this book. It was upon reading it that I finally realized that the only thing stopping me from writing professional* quality software was a matter of time and patience (access to a "real" language helps, too). My parents only saw the back of my head for months after that.
*"Professional" in this case is defined as the various shareware games I managed to acquire, most of which easily impressed the likes of me at the time.