Idle thoughts
Andrew Cummins
David Graves asked in email for interested readers of the group to
post some details of their involvement in IF. As I haven't seen
any go past I thought that I would start the ball rolling...
As a user of Interactive Fiction my experience started with (as for
so many others) Colossal Caves,followed swiftly by the Zork series
on microcomputers...was I ever hooked...and then on into the wonders
of multi-user dial-up adventures, mainly Mud II the UK commercial
version of the original Essex Mud.
I became involved with building games through an article in Dr Dobbs
which gave a listing for a program 'Adven-80' which provided the spark
for a home brew text-adventure builder running on CP/M micro's.
At the time in the UK the Sinclair Spectrum, a Z80 based colour computer
with a massive 40K of useable ram :-), was in its first year and selling
like hot cakes at ~$400.
With a couple of friends we started a little adventure building group.
The port to the Spectrum was diabolical, without any real debugging tools,
a two hour build-link-download over wet string cycle and bugs in the
interpreter masking/generating bugs in the game itself; but eventually
'Castle Blackstar' our opus worked, got some pleasant reviews and even
sold a few hundred copies.
Buoyed up with enthusiasm we embarked on our second game, improved the
compression, tweaked the interpreter and then discovered that the golden
age of text games was over -- 'everyone' (at least on the marketing side)
wanted graphics based games. In the UK retailers had caught a cold with
some very poor quality games and commercially, pure text games were dead.
This had interesting consequences in that it effectively up-ed the ante
on the financial commitment required to actually put a game together, it
also eliminated the most plentiful range of machines (at the time) because
they didn't have the hardware resources to cope.
The attributes that you need to create a text game (IMHO) are some
programming skill, creative writing ability, fertile imagination, and
man-months of effort. This can be generated by individuals working in
their spare time on a hobby.
When you add graphics / pictures you need to stir in an additional element
of artistic skill and significant additional effort in terms of difficulty
of porting the result to a range of machines. This takes the scope of
such a project beyond that of a normal hobby to something that can really
only be performed as full-time research or by commercial organisations
(ignoring the possibility of philanthropy).
[ I recall a talk given by Ken Gordon of Magnetic Scrolls (the Pawn,
Jinxter, Guild of Thieves) where he said that the major limitation on
their production of games was the time and cost of origination of
artwork (say ~30 images per game) and that their bill for artwork on
their first three games was $150K.]
I think this problem will get worse rather than better in that if you
were to want to build the next generation of game say based around
CD-Rom storage capacity the resources you require to generate moving
images, backdrops, sound tracks etc (not to mention plot) becomes more
akin to that requiring the skills of a film company and in the process
drives the small outfits right out of the ballpark.
Anyway, thats enough to start with, I guess that I've come at IF from
a different direction to most of the posters that I've read to date
(Are there really only 3-4 posts a week or is my feed screwed) but
what the heck.
Flames to the bit-bucket, what do YOU think about it all,
-- Andrew
acum...@acorn.co.uk
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-- I am a free-spirit : You are eccentric : He is round the bend --