Two years ago I implemented a light version of the combat system found in Eamon games into ADRIFT 5. I did this since many new ADRIFT users ask for a combat system and since I like the Eamon combat system.
Now I have decided to implement a “full” Eamon experience in ADRIFT. It will contain the Main Hall where the player between adventures can buy and sell weapons, buy spells, train weapon abilities etc. etc. The first version will probably contain 10 classic Eamon adventures from the heyday of the Apple II and in the long run hopefully many more.
To my knowledge, this has never been done in an IF tool before (I am aware of the Inform game Leadlight Gamma). However, Eamon is not entirely dead. There are people out there who are currently converting the old classics for online play (Eamon Remastered) and a C# branch (Eamon CS) for Windows, Android and Unix. In addition, the Eamon Wiki ( https://eamon.wiki/ ) is kept up to date. Before those systems, Eamon Deluxe (Mac, Linux, Windows) was very good but it hasn’t been updated since 2012.
Unfortunately, there isn’t a forum for Eamon players/authors/developers. I was hoping it could be here on intfiction. Thus I tried to add an “Eamon”-tag. Hope I did it right(?)
The purpose of this specific post is to get in touch with other Eamon-users since I would like some feedback on what might be important, e.g. copyright issues, which adventures to include, how to find technical details for a more authentic experience etc.
One of the advantages of ADRIFT is the auto-map. Below is a sketch of how I intend to implement the Main Hall. Any feedback is very welcome. Thanks.
If my ~40 year old memory serves me, the cool part of Eamon was the adventures were written in basic, so you could make anything custom happen in your adventure. Also, it was the first hardcore game I knew of. When you went into an adventure your character was deleted off the disk and only restored if you survived. Brutal!
Yes, the Basic code of each Eamon adventure was fairly easy to understand, making it simple to to create your own adventure. It will also be simple to create your own adventure in Eamon Revived, since ADRIFT is pretty easy to use, and I will create a manual on how to create new Eamon Revived adventures. Everything in your own game can be customized.
Yes, the original Eamon system was pretty brutal. Eamon Revived is much less brutal. For instance, you can SAVE and RESTORE whenever you want. Of course, this can in theory be used to “cheat” by beating powerful enemies you are not ready to face yet, though this would be quite cumbersome. I can only recommend players not to cheat.
Actually, i don’t know - I first discovered Eamon in early 2018. I never had an Apple Computer but a Commodore 64 in my youth, probably because I grew up in Europe.
But I must say I am very impressed with how good the Eamon system was, especially considering it was written in Basic in 1979. There are lots of good Eamon games and I hope to implement some of the classic games, which never made it into any of the other “modern” Eamon systems, i.e. Eamon Remastered, Eamon CS and Eamon Deluxe.
