Back in the day I played a ton of games on my Commodore 64 computer. I've mentioned before that Ultima IV remains my alltime favorite computer game. Anybody else remember the Adventure Construction Set? Designed by Stuart Smith and put out by Electronic Arts back before EA turned White Dwarf into an all-Warhammer magazine, it was basically designed to allow you to build your own Ultima-style adventures. I messed around with ACS a lot as a kid, though I finished very few or no adventures without resorting to the 'finish adventure' button, which simply filled out the rest of the adventure with randomly generated crap.
The graphics were even more crude than Ultima IV, with fewer colors and no animation. The tiny little animations of the waves on the water tiles and the moving people really brought the world of Ultima to life. I understand the Amiga version of ACS had somewhat more sophisticated graphics.Recently I encountered a newer program directly inspired by ACS. Written in 1995, it's called the Adventure Creation Kit. Unlike ACS, it's easy to find for free download and no emulation or other fiddling is needed to make it run on a more modern machine. I have no reports on running it under Vista, but last night I was messing around with ACK on a Windows set-up. No sound is available unless you use DOSBox, an emulator designed to make old games run more smoothly on newer machines.
One thing I have yet to figure out is whether this new toy makes executables, like the old ACS did. A game made in ACS comes out as a single .exe file that can be shared with people who don't have to own a copy of the game creation software. Ken St. Andre of Tunnels & Trolls fame used to maintain a fan club of people who swapped and bought/sold disks of completed games. Personally, I'd love to be able to create a little Encounter Critical themed adventure I could share with the folks on the EC mailing list. Last night I made a Theskian Dagger item and a rough draft map of Blacksteel Isle. That's a start.
In fact, it was Encounter Critical that got me thinking about digging up Adventure Construction Set. An ACS adventure just struck me as the kind of obsessive EC-related fanboy activity that I would enjoy, the same way I tried to learn to make online quizzes so I could whip up the Which EC Character Are You? thing-a-ma-jig.
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Adventure Construction Set is my most favourite videogame ever.
ReplyDeleteEV4R!!!
My brother and I spent countless hours making adventures with it. So much fun. :)
I had a copy of Adventure Construction Set ... Never got anything finished with it, but I remember it eating up several hours in the attempt :)
ReplyDeleteAdventure Construction Set! I have so many fond memories of this game... My friend and I constructed a game in which you played a student trying to get through our junior high school. I had a ball making "monsters" of our teachers, armed with throwable pieces of chalk and choking eraser dust.
ReplyDeleteAnd the music! I loved the fact that you had so many types of musical bits to play with, and could cue them at different points. We even used them for a radio show we recorded...
Classic.
Oh yeah! I loved that game, and made a handful of adventures for my friends, mostly sci-fi themed. I don't remember the music, but I was running it on an Apple IIe, so we might not have had sound.
ReplyDeleteYou might want to check out Runesword over at Crosscut Games (www.crosscutgames.com). I don't think it's customizable enough for your needs, nor does it make stand-alone executables, but I have heard good things about it as a fantasy game construction set.
Ultima IV was good. Ultima V was better. ;)
- Brian
PS - Your Adventure Creation Kit link goes to your post about Ultima IV. The url you want is http://www.mozomedia.com/ack/, I think.
ReplyDelete- Brian
Thanks for the corrections, trollsmyth. Unfortunately, blogger is giving me hassle right now so I can't correct the link in the body of this entry.
ReplyDeleteIf you're interested in other game-making kits, I know of a few and I know I've read about many others. The two that come to mind immediately are:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/
... which is for making LucasArts/Late-Era Sierra style point-and-click adventures (creates fully installable Windows titles).
http://www.enterbrain.co.jp/tkool/RPG_XP/eng/
... which is for making top-town RPG type games (of a 1990s sort, however - more Final Fantasy than Ultima). Not sure about the executable or whatnot.
I've not messed around with either of them, but I've played some games built with the first one and they rock out, if you dig that kind of thing.
Others I have vague knowledge of include IRE Computer RPG Maker (which I think makes cross-platform games ... not sure if that means they run on a VM or something else) ... Game Maker (http://www.yoyogames.com/gamemaker/) which looks pretty potent for several game types and is still actively supported, and Explorations (http://www.explore-rpg.com/) which is aimed more at Baldur's-Gateish style.
Neat to see Adventure Construction Set discussed here. I recently set up an ACS site for people to post homemade adventures. Please post yours at http://www.adventureconstructionset.com or email them to me at DanElmaleh@hotmail.com
ReplyDeleteI always wonder whatever happened to Stuart Smith, the creator of Adventure Construction Set. He had Two early hits with "Ali Baba" and "Return of Herecles", then Adventure Construction Set on its various platforms - And that's it! Nothing more was ever heard! It seems tragic that he didn't have any further hand in the Golden Age of adventure games in th '90s... Other than inspiring legions of other games...
ReplyDeleteStuart Smith was my hero, as far as fantasy gaming on computers went. Had a lot of run with ACS, too, and the Amiga version contained my own published gigantic SF adventure. I thought my best trick was making the entire right side of the screen on one map into teleports to another map, and the entire left side of that one into teleports back to the first--thus effectively creating a scene that was double the normal size.
ReplyDeleteI still have my copy of this venerable software. Open up the package to find a goofy photo of the costumed game designer posing at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco!
ReplyDeletehttp://www.mobygames.com/game/adventure-construction-set/cover-art/gameCoverId,120769/
I do remember creating a Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy themed adventure with this game. I do wish I still had it; I was quite proud of the Zaphod Beeblebrox icon that I made for it. It is tough to get the two heads and three arms to look right with such a small image.