Pick up the pen
Spectrum interactive fiction in the 21st century
First appeared in ZXF issue 5 (Summer 2003)
One of the pieces of feedback I received from one of my Blink playtesters was, "think it's a good idea not to include graphics as people expect too much these days, so with just text, it's left to your imagination." Computer games, of course, have evolved a great deal since the Spectrum's heyday; the same is true of the adventure game, but where arcade games have added in just about every bell and whistle known to humankind over the last 20 or so years, the text adventure has evolved into a much simpler, purer artform. Interactive Fiction is the new title for this genre, in fact, and an appropriate one it is too, when you think about it. On download or purchase of an IF game it is a piece of writing that you have your hands on, after all, and thus it is the quality of the writing that counts. It's not that I'm against graphics in adventure games - I'm not; well chosen images can do a lot to enhance atmosphere - but when we're talking 48K Spectrum, the amount of memory you have availible is already a limitation on the amount you can write - and if this is to be the main criteria by which your work will be judged, why sacrifice it for pictures which (in this day and age) are hardly likely to cause jaws to drop?
Adventure games used to be about problem solving more than anything else, with the quality of the writing taking something of a back seat. You visited locations. You found objects. you used the objects to solve problems. Kill ogre with sword. Unlock the door with the blue key. And so on. Location descriptions were usually a few lines of fairly bland text (all in block capitals if you were really unlucky), starting with a sentence like, "I/You am/are in a big/little/dark/wallpapered room..." Somtimes the number of locations ran into triple figures, but quantity rarely bespoke quality. In my mind, the adventure games to appear on the Spectrum (although none of them were written specifically for the Spectrum) which pushed writing up the ladder of priority were titles such as the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy and any of the Magnetic Scrolls adventures (Jinxter was a particular favourite of mine). These were titles that appeared fairly late into the Spectrum's day, but - other than memory (all the Magnetic Scrolls adventures, for example, were +3 only games) there is no reason I can think of why this sort of creativity could not have occured earlier. To put it another way, there is no reason why a Spectrum IF game written today could not be judged alongside the very best of the genre - with only text to deal with, system specs become irrelevant (again - memory aside), the playing field is level and we are limited only by our imaginations </CLICHE>
Down to the practicalities: what do you need and where do you start? If you're the sort of person who is able to program a complete language parser (the code that analyses a player's instructions) then probably nothing here will be new to you. the route that everyone else is likely to follow will be to use an adventure game authoring program. the program I'm most familiar with is the Professional Adventure Writer (PAW) by Gilsoft. This is the program I used to write Blink with and, many years ago, my first ever adventure game, The Forest Stop. I remember quite clearly falling in love with PAW when it first came out in 1986. My mate Trev and I had been playing around with GAC (Graphic Adventure Creator) from Incentive for quite a while, and were about to commit to authoring with it. I don't recall what it was that caused us therefore to get hold of PAW, but we were glad that we did. Little things - like being able to type into your code the actual words you had define in your vocabulary list, rather than just their numbers - made it a lot easier to use. Today, PAW still stands up well for ease of use; there are admitedly a few things that niggle, now that we're all spoilt by WYSIWYG word processors and the like - such as the absence of a copy and paste feature, and having to move backwards through text letter... by... letter... in order to edit something at the begining - but these are minor - you soon get used to them - and some can be worked around by the creative use of emulators.
Following its initial release, PAW received a number of updates, the last (I believe) being version A17C. Along the way, the ability to load in third party modules - or 'overlays,' as they were called - to add extra features to the system was included. Essentially a modular system anyway (48K users didn't get the whole system at once and had to load in and out of memory the various modules - location text, process tables, etc - as required, which must have been a chore), the potential for these was enourmous, but the only commercially released overlays that I know of were the 3 Kelsoft modules (Phosis, Mega and ). I wonder if there were others released into the public domain, however, and if you know of any I would really like to hear from you.
PAW is not the best that an adventure writing system for the Spectrum could possibly be - you are restricted to a 32 column display, for example (although you could define different character sets) and a 42 column display just looks so much nicer) - but in my mind, at least, it's by far the best there is available. CRASH even went so far as to call it the best utility ever written for the Spectrum. Not bad. Of course it is downloadable from WoS and - even better news - the rather excellent technical manual can also be accessed online at www.madhippy.com/8-bit/sinclair/paw/index.html
One final point is that another rather nice feature of using PAW is that you can now convert 48K PAW adventures to fully blown Windows adventures. You'll need Douglas Harter's WinPAW (www.winpaw.com) to do this, version 5.0 of which was released this July. You'll also need UNPAWS to decompile your original Spectrum adventure database, also available here. Both of these programs are freeware.
Top tips for using PAW with an emulator
Use an emulator. You probably were going to anyway, but just in case you were tempted to go for the 'performance art' process of using real hardware, consider the pain of having to SAVE and VERIFY your adventure game database each time you end a PAW session with the simplicity of a quick snapshot save.
Speed up your emulator to about 300 per cent to speed up the entry of long text passages (the cursor gets slower... and... slower... the more you type). Any faster though and key presses might be missed. Speed it up all the way when using the text compressor, however.
Run two seperate emulator windows - one for editing, the other for testing; alternatively you could use two seperate emulators. Snapshot save your current 'state' and then load it into the other emulator to test. This way you can immediately edit/investigate any bugs you encounter without having to exit the test routine to get back to the editor.
Edit using SPIN. Pressing ENTER when you're editing text in PAW simply returns you to whatever sub-menu you came from. If you want to actually enter a carriage return (ie, to do what ENTER would normally do) you need to change the INK colour to white and press DELETE - to do the former you'll need to know which combination of PC keys mimics SYMBOL SHIFT EXTENDED whatever. But you don't have to worry about any of this if you're using SPIN: its excellent Keyboard Helper feature includes a Modes picklist, from which you can select 'White Ink' and then send this command to the emulated Spectrum. Of course you can also use this to change text colour easily, make text BRIGHT, and so on.
Ask a friend to playtest your adventure on an emulator. Ask two. Ask three. Get them to make an RZX recording of their test session(s) for you to watch. Aside from their general verbal/written feedback, the input recording will be an invaluable source of information for the sorts of commands/instructions they are expecting to be able to enter and which you might have overlooked. Oh, and make sure you leave a bit of memory spare on the test version so you can actually implement any modifications/suggestions that come out of the playtests.
