Graphic Adventure Creator
Programming Clinic

by the Balrog

PART TWO

.The Graphic Adventure Creator, like a machine code assembler, is not something you can just load in and use straight away - it can take months to learn properly but the basics can be learnt very quickly.

My first puzzle!

Not only are we going to add more locations to our bank adventure, we'll also be adding a puzzle (a locked bank vault door) and a maze!

First let's add the extra locations -

Room 3 'You are outside the bank. Exits are north and west.'
Connections: N 2 W 4

Room 4 'You are on the the high street. There is an exit to the east and you can go down to the sewers.'
Connections: E 3 D 5

and amend the old locations...

Add the message 'The bank vault door lies open to the east.' (We're not going to allow the adventurer to close the vault, just open it) in Room 1.

Remove the exit 'west 1' from room 2 (as we'll be putting a door between these two locations) and add south 3. Also add to the end of the room description 'There is an exit to the south and a large bank vault door to the west.'

Now let's add a maze - lets have the maze as a sewer complex beneath the high street...

Room 5 'You are in a dark sewer. You can see daylight above.'
Connections: U 4 N 8 S 7 E 7 W 6

Room 6 'You are in a smelly sewer.'
Connections: N 7 S 8 W 5 E 6

Room 7 'You are in a slimy sewer.'
Connections: N 6 W 7 E 7 S 8

Room 8 'You are in a sewer.'
Connections: N 7 S 8 W 8 E 8

So let's go over what we've got now - we've added a lot more locations, including a four room sewer maze which should be good (and could be made a lot harder if you changed all the location descriptions to be the same!). Now, we still want to add -

Start in room 8
Put a key in room 8
Add a door to Room 2
Add a puzzle which lets you open the door with the key...

Starting in room 8 is easy - just go to the 'Begin where?' menu and change it to 8! As to putting the key in room 8, follow the same approach as the bar of gold from last issue - ie..

Nouns
2 Key
Objects
2 a key
starts in room 8
and weighs 1.
Messages
2 The key looks important...

Low Priority:-

11: IF (VERB 7 AND NOUN 2 AND HERE 2) GET 2 OKAY END
12: IF (VERB 8 AND NOUN 2 AND CARR 2) DROP 2 OKAY END
13: IF (VERB 16 AND NOUN 2 AND AVAI 2) MESS 2 END

Adding the door and the puzzle element is the complicated bit -

Add MESSAGE 3 'The door is wide open..'

add 'door', 'vault' and 'bank' as noun 3 and add the verb 'unlock' to the verb list (make it verb 18).

Now go the local room conditions and add a condition for room 2 -

IF (VERB 4 AND SET? 3) GOTO 1 WAIT END

If you typed 'West' and marker/flag three is set (ie the door is open) the go to room 1 (the bank vault).

Also add IF (VERB 4) MESS 4 WAIT END to the list (if type go west and marker is not set then print message 4 (which we make 'You can't walk through doors you know!'))

And finally add

IF (VERB 18 AND NOUN 3 AND CARR 2) SET 3 WAIT END

Which basically says if you typed 'UNLOCK DOOR' and you have the key on you then set the door to be unlocked.

Finally we want to add the message about the door being open to the end of the room description so we need to go to the high priority conditions menu and add -

1: IF (AT 2 AND SET? 3) MESS 3

And we should be ready to rock and roll! Pat yourself on the back if it works - 'Bank adventure' now looks much more like a proper adventure than the two location 'thing' we created last month! If it doesn't work then look at the errors box to see what you've done wrong...

Save the file before doing anything else. In Part 3, we will be looking at graphics.

You can download GAC_Part2.zip by clicking on the filename. It contains a datafile containing part 2 and a runnable version of part 2. Just type in RUN"PART2" in BASIC.