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Adventuring Underground
Issue 6
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.
A few of you have written to Just Adventure or me with concerns about Adventuring Underground. Before diving into part five of Making Your Own Adventure Game 101, I will take just a moment to address some of these concerns.
Many of the emails I've received are from people who want to know more about my background and what qualifies me to write Adventuring Underground. I've been a hobbyist game creator for 18 years. I started out typing out simple games in Basic on a Commodore Vic-20 and have written several dozen games. I have fond memories of trying to best games I saw in magazines like Compute! Most games I've written have never been released on the Internet. I own and have used just about every game creation tool ever released for home use. My current tool of choice is Multimedia Fusion, and I'm working on a game called C.H.I.M.P. that will feature fully rendered graphics and have a control scheme similar to the Alone in the Dark games. It's my biggest project to date, and I can guarantee it will not match the quality of commercial games.
Speaking of commercial games: quite a few people have written me with concerns that the articles I write will not help a person succeed in the commercial market. I felt that my original statements in Adventuring Underground Issue 1 were quite clear in that regard: I write from a hobbyist perspective for other hobbyists. In fact, I am trying to write on a level such that a person who has never made a game in his or her life will understand what I am talking about. The knowledge I spout out is for people who want to spend a few weeks by themselves creating a game for no other reason than their own enjoyment. Not every runner wants to make the Olympics, not every artist wants to be Andy Warhol, and not every game creator wants to be a professional. In short, yes, I know Visual Basic doesn't "cut it" at LucasArts, but it's more than suitable in a hobbyist home.
If you are really nosy, bored, or both, I have a section on my home page that covers the games I'm working on.
The Creator's Toolbox
Making Your Own Adventure Game 101: Class 5--Building Your First Adventure Game Part 2
In the two weeks since our last session, you were supposed to draw 15 pictures using the paint utility that came with your computer. You could also have just written paragraphs describing the fifteen pictures if drawing scares you. The pictures were: 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. Hopefully all of you realize that I just listed 11 items, not 15. Well, I messed up two weeks ago and left off four items. The other four are a good ending, a bad ending, the intro, and a jail wall.
Here is my finished game. My version of "Escape from Boot Hill Jail" is totally unpolished, but it is functional. From start to finish, I spent about 90 minutes working on the game. I found limiting myself to the paintbrush utility that came with Windows 95/98 to be a frustrating experience at best. Oh, how I longed for the layers of Adobe Photoshop or the vectors of Corel Draw. However, I didn't want to cheat and not follow my own instructions. As you go to each room, use your browser's "view source" option to examine the HTML code. You can use this code to copy and paste into your own game if you are a complete novice to HTML.
I will discuss the logic that went into making my version of the game for this exercise. You may, of course, do something completely different. My main goal was to generate the simplest code that would get the job done. I am fully aware that scripts and HTML formatting could have been used to make a more elegant gaming experience, but then it would have added other layers of complexity that many people aren't ready or willing to deal with.
The first challenge I had to overcome was how to deal with movement. Since I couldn't write complex scripts to create an engine that would handle loading pictures, keep track of the location of the player, or other such matters, I decided to make each location a separate web page, otherwise known as an HTML document. To begin with, I created four HTML documents, each facing a direction in the jail cell. Then I padded the world with a search option. With three objects to search in the jail, that brought the total number of documents to seven.
The next challenge facing me was how to handle inventory and variables. Once again, I made each a separate HTML document. However, since objects and variables followed the player, I had to create a whole series of HTML documents. When the player finds a key in the jail, the player is sent to the series of HTML documents that have the player holding a key. Just with one inventory item, I have a total of 14 different HTML documents. When the door is open, I need to write more documents.
This may sound like a lot of work, but it's not. Most of the time, I just needed to load up a document, change a single line and a few characters, and then save it as a different file. As documents began to quickly pile up, I started a file-naming convention. The first part of the file name is the room, the second is the one-letter direction, and the last is the variable. An "r" is added to the name for when the player is given a response. For example, jail-nk.html means the player is in the jail, facing north, and has the key.
So basically, that's it. I progressed through each item, adding documents where needed, until I completed the body of the game. Then I slapped on the introductions and the two endings. So look through the sample I provided, and from that you should be able to construct your first adventure game. Next week I'll tell you where you can go from here.
Featured Underground Game of the Week
There is no featured game of the week. Why? Well, I've run out of freeware or shareware graphic adventure games to feature. If you know of any, drop me a line and I'll take a look at it. Even if it's just a web page about a game that is being worked on and is still a long way off, I want to hear about it.