Plan for James W. Hofmann
by abc · 10/15/2005 (4:07 am) · 1 comments
I like making tools, and there was one game-making tool that I particularly liked back in the day. It was actually a clone of another game-making tool. The original was Stuart Smith's Adventure Construction Set, the clone was Chris Hopkins' Adventure Creation Kit. I never got to use ACS on a real 8-bit, but I've taken a look at it again through emulation and while the responsiveness of it was pretty poor, the essentials for making a lightweight, early-Ultima-esque role-playing game with puzzles and combat were all there.
ACK was a substantial improvement on ACS, being a DOS program with mode 13h graphics, CMF music and VOC sound effects, and a much more powerful editor with a small scripting language. You could do vehicles, dialogues, unique items, spellcasting... I loved this program at the time, since it really hit a sweet spot between power and usability with an integrated environment and lots of templates to work off of. It was buggy and the example games were actually broken in places, but as a pre-adolescent I could put together all the set-piece battles and power-fantasies I wanted, and I didn't feel overwhelmed by the amount of graphical work needed either because it kept the same tile restrictions and even the same "color-on-blackground" style in the default graphics so all you needed was a little bit of pixelling ability and you could make things that fit in nicely.
So I decided to make the whole thing anew, make it an open-source project, Python-based, and of course do it all a little bit better. "Quest Construction Set" seems like a reasonable clone title, and it doesn't appear to be taken. This will be my development diary. It's taking me a while to even get anything on the screen since I'm spending so much time on structure details, but I think I'm finally getting a decent framework together. The main goal for a first version is "have the player character moving around a large map with animated tiles, and an editor for said map." The way I've structured it, adding things will become much easier once the first one is there. Midterms will take precedence this coming week, however...
ACK was a substantial improvement on ACS, being a DOS program with mode 13h graphics, CMF music and VOC sound effects, and a much more powerful editor with a small scripting language. You could do vehicles, dialogues, unique items, spellcasting... I loved this program at the time, since it really hit a sweet spot between power and usability with an integrated environment and lots of templates to work off of. It was buggy and the example games were actually broken in places, but as a pre-adolescent I could put together all the set-piece battles and power-fantasies I wanted, and I didn't feel overwhelmed by the amount of graphical work needed either because it kept the same tile restrictions and even the same "color-on-blackground" style in the default graphics so all you needed was a little bit of pixelling ability and you could make things that fit in nicely.
So I decided to make the whole thing anew, make it an open-source project, Python-based, and of course do it all a little bit better. "Quest Construction Set" seems like a reasonable clone title, and it doesn't appear to be taken. This will be my development diary. It's taking me a while to even get anything on the screen since I'm spending so much time on structure details, but I think I'm finally getting a decent framework together. The main goal for a first version is "have the player character moving around a large map with animated tiles, and an editor for said map." The way I've structured it, adding things will become much easier once the first one is there. Midterms will take precedence this coming week, however...
About the author
Torque 3D Owner Jay Barnson
I guess the best question to ask would be --- what would your QCS offer above and beyond, say, Neverwinter Nights. The first answers that come to my mind would be greater flexibility in genre and rule system. There's a lot to go into it, though. I'm anxious to see it develop. Good luck to you!