Classic Adventure Game Creation Book Online

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?

[Sevn]

Wow. If I had a neat little toolkit to make
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?

[david duncan scott]

Here you go -- Inform [inform-fiction.org] supports PalmOS.

With those requirements...

[Rares Marian]

You could emulate a beowulf cluster of those that would eventually become sentient, look at all the Quake clones on the market, realize that you have no life, realize that it is forgotten, and shut itself off in disgust.

Interactive Fiction Authoring Tools

[Anonymous Coward]

A bit OT, but Roger Firth's Cloak of Darkness [firthworks.com] contains a comparition of modern interactive fiction development tools.

Damn.

[ColaMan]

"you'll need a computer with Basic and at least 24K of RAM."
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.

[david duncan scott]

Yeah, that was one of the first things I noticed about Windows, way back when. CP/M shipped with an assembler, but DOS gave you BASIC instead (although they continued to give you the linker), then with Windows they dropped even that. Think maybe they'd prefer you to buy apps instead of throwing them together yourself?

Anyway, there's always SmallBASIC [sourceforge.net]. You can gosub to line numbers and everything, just like the old days. :)

Compatibility

[NaDrew]

Apple II and IIe (and compatibles)

Atari
Coleco ADAM
Commodore 64
IBM PC (and compatibles)
Texas Instruments TI 99/4a (with Extended BASIC)
TRS-80 Models 1, 2, 3, and 100
TRS-80 Color Computer
VIC 20

Hmm, I seem to have at least three of those (C64, IBM PC [8088 4.77MHz!], VIC 20) in my garage. I wonder if it would work on an Osbourne?

Another introductory guide

[NaveNosnave]

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...

[Prior Restraint]

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.