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Adventuring Underground
Issue 4

By Rob Merritt

Adventuring Underground is a weekly feature that will cover the burgeoning community of shareware and freeware adventure games available on the Internet.

The Creator's Toolbox

Making Your Own Adventure Game 101: Class 4--Building Your First Adventure Game Part 1

This is the big week. At long last, I stop yapping about game theory and get to the meat of the issue. For many of you, this will be your first adventure game. I realize that many, if not all, of you want to start working on your vision right now. The problem with that is I cannot possibly write an article on creating your first adventure game and cover every possible option. I will guide you, step by step, in creating a specific adventure game.

The subgenre for our adventure game is first-person graphic adventure. Working a little backward from what I previously said, I picked the tools and then came up with the game. For our first adventure game, I have picked tools that virtually everyone already has. The game engine will be your web browser. Yes, that means your first game will be a bunch of linked web pages. I know it isn't as exciting as a 3D game like Grim Fandango, but everyone has to start somewhere. Our other tools will be a text editor and a paintbrush program.

For the sole reason of making this an easy and painless exercise, I'm picking a simple and very short plot. The player is in an old west jail. He or she must escape from the jail and find a way past the sheriff standing guard outside. Now, in reality, our whole adventure game would be but a tiny puzzle in another game. That said, this game will have everything that a full adventure game has. Escape from Boothill Jail, as we'll call it, will have a beginning, an end, rooms, characters, plot, dialog, interface, items, and puzzles.

Two characters occupy the game: the player and the sheriff. Often, it is forgotten that the player is a character, too. In the introduction to the game, you have to give the player a little background on his/her character. Explain why he/she is in jail and give a little motivation to get out. The text you write here will most likely be the first thing the gamer sees when he or she loads your game, so make it interesting. In my introduction, I talk about how the player's character, a drifter, was caught messing around with the sheriff's daughter. He will be hanged at sunup. As for the other character, the sheriff, if he sees you sneaking out of jail, he kills your character. That would be the "losing" ending.

There are going to be at lest two usable items and five examinable items. You may, of course, add more items, but for this exercise, I'm sticking with seven items. The two usable items are a lock pick and a blow dart, and the five examinable items are a bed, a pot, bar door, the sheriff's desk, and a window.

In last week's Adventuring Underground, I wrote that adventure games need to be divided into rooms. In some adventure games, there is only one type of room. In Escape from Boothill Jail, there are going to be three story rooms and nine logical rooms. A story room is very much like a room as most people think of it. In this game, the three story rooms are a jail cell, the sheriff's office, and outside. A logical room is an area the player can visit. In our game, the logical rooms are north, south, west, and east in the jail cell and the office. The last logical room is outside.

I can imagine that a lot of you just seized up when I said "graphic." Just relax and try to draw boxes and stick figures if you are not confident in your drawing ability. If you cannot deal with the idea of creating graphics, you can just write a description of each graphic, and I'll explain how to insert than into the game next week. For this week, we are just going to write and draw.

Here are your tasks for this week. Write paragraphs for an introduction, a losing ending, and a winning ending. Draw pictures showing or paragraphs describing the following: a jail's bar door closed from inside of the jail; a jail's bar door open from inside of the jail; a jail's bar door open from outside of the jail; a jail's bed; a jail's pot or toilet; a jail's wall; a door, the sheriff's desk; a window with bars; a lock pick; and a blow dart gun. Save all your pictures in GIF or JPG format. If your paintbrush program supports it, keep the resolution under 640 by 480. Next week, we will cover the logic and coding of the game.

Featured Game of the Week: Leo's Great Day

This week's featured game is a freeware adventure gaming offering from Germany. Leo's Great Day is web-based, but it goes beyond what most people have come to expect from web-based games. It feels more like a game running from your CD instead of a game you are playing on the web. The game was written entirely in Shockwave.

It is hard to believe that the whole game is only 150 KB. Leo's Great Day is an excellent example of how style is equally important to technological gee-whiz. The story line is fresh and original. Your alter-ego, Leo, wakes up Monday morning to find that his house has been buried in rock, and a gateway opens to an underground world.