Hello everyone! I’ve always enjoyed interactive fiction and I’m interested in programming a graphic adventure. I had the idea to make a multiplatform game for PC and ZX Spectrum. I got really excited when I found Adventuron, which seems to be the ideal tool. However, to my sadness, Adventuron doesn’t allow commercial games. Could you recommend an alternative engine or some process for this? Thank you!
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Spectrum is not my area of expertise, but I feel like if there was a system for making graphic adventures for the Spectrum other than Adventuron, I would have heard about it. I otherwise only know of the text-only systems (Quill, PAWs).
People often use Punyinform to produce text adventures that can be rendered for a ton of retro platforms, but I think the ZX Spectrum isn’t powerful enough for that. Two random games I looked at using this system have the Spectrum +3 as the minimum supported Spectrum.
-Wade
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I believe some commercial graphic adventure games have been released using Adventure Game Studio. If you’re looking for something with a parser, though, I don’t know if AGS does that. The AGS games I’m aware of have point and click graphics, not text input. (And I don’t know about ZX Spectrum.)
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Thanks! I’ll give a look, pity that do not have graphics in each screen.
The computer itself is better-spec’ed than some of the earliest bare-bones Infocom implementations (some of the early titles would run on a 32k computer!) but since random-access storage was almost completely unheard of on the base Spectrum, everybody seems to target the higher-spec machines.
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Tools from back in the day, for graphical ZX Spectrum adventures, included the GAC and the Quill with the Illustrator… there’s no reason why you couldn’t use those today if you don’t mind working on an old machine or an emulator. The requirement to release a commercial game was that you owned a copy of the program. You can pick these up second hand should you feel that people are likely to both you about this. Tim Gilberts (of Gilsoft who released the Quill) will happily receive a Paypal donation.
I think what may be your best bet, though, is DAAD. This would allow you to release text adventures with graphics for the ZX Spectrum and PC, along with a whole host of other retro platforms (you would obviously need different graphics tailored for each). You can develop your games easily on a modern PC.
The DAAD interpretor is actually what any games produced with Adventuron uses to run on the ZX Spectrum.
The easiest way into DAAD is through DAAD Ready. See DAAD Ready
[Re. Punyinform and the Spectrum. As mentioned, the Spectrum +3 has a disk drive so you can get Punyinform games, and a whole host of z-machine titles in general, running on that. I played Infocom games on it back in the day as you could run CP/M on it too.)
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PunyInform doesn’t support graphics. If it does, it’s the world’s best-kept secret.
The other Inform 6 alternative is to use the standard library and compile to Glulx, but I don’t think there are any Glulx interpreters for any flavour of Spectrum.
I think it’s okay to use Adventuron’s 8-bit mode (but this is pretty limiting) and export to DAAD via DAAD Ready. There are a couple of commercial games that do this and this is okay, as the Adventuron engine is not bundled with the game.
Otherwise, as @8bitAG said, use The Quill with The Illustrator, GAC or DAAD.
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Thanks for all the suggestions! I’ll give a look in all of that.
I’d never used Punyinform, but my brain probably assembled the incorrect impression over time that it could do graphics because of all the graphics shots (that don’t show the game being played) on itch pages for those games. It turns out they’re extras and/or promotional.
-Wade
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Usually it’s just the loader screen.
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I take back what I said about PunyInform not being able to do graphics. I don’t think anyone’s ever done this before, but I’m just dabbling with it and I can compile to a z6 file, compile my resources to a zblorb file and display an image. It’s a bit crude at the moment. The status bar doesn’t cover the full screen width, but it shows promise. I’ll do a bit of experimenting when time permits. If I can get this working nicely, I’d like to convert my illustrated Adventuron games to PunyInform.
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There are many IF games playable in ZXSPECTRUM. I am a fan of those since 1983. You can find them in Worldofspectrum.net or some pages related.
You have an interpreter for zcode here: https://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/infocom/interpreters/zxzvm/zxzvm.zip
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I found this engine named Lantern (http://textadventure.net/) that can export to ZX Spectrum and other platforms, with graphics options for Spectrum and DOS. I’m receiving a .NET error when opening the file (but the app starts) and the interface has jumbled letters. Has anyone used this engine? I will send an email to the creator.
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You might consider also supporting the Spectrum Next, especially if your game might be commercial.
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I would say that https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/ is the best site for ZX Spectrum games these days.
Quantum Sheep has used Evan’s Lantern software to produce three text adventures,e.g. The Seance by Quantum Sheep There aren’t many other examples, outside of some deliberately “crap” games.
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I took a closer look at PunyInform’s support for v6. There isn’t any. All the display functions have been copied from the standard library’s parser.h to PunyInform’s puny.h. There are some small changes, but all the v6 support has been removed. I can’t understand why. It doesn’t increase the file size (or not by very much), as it’s all conditionally compiled.
It looks like it would be fairly easy to fix this oversight and would make an interesting little project when I have some spare time.
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