Anarchy! with Bob Speel's adventure system (Performed by me)
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EnglishVoice Age
Middle Aged (35-54)Accents
British (General)Transcript
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Greeting Traveler. Welcome to the world of S Robert Spiel. Call me Bob. Today. I will take you far beyond the realms of your imagination, not my imagination because my imagination is brilliant but yours to world of wonder and excitement for today. I'm gonna show you the secrets of creating adventure games. Let's get started. Scenario maker is a program that allows you to input your own scenario and actually helps you do. So decide what objects and boxes you want to want to uh include. Then you run the scenario maker. It doesn't take very long to load the best way to show using it says Mr Spiel is with an example. It's one way you are going to hunt for a fossil. So we're calling it a fossil hunt and then ask for introduction. This is the introductory text. Don't just say why? For introduction, you have to actually type it all out. So this is the text that appears at the start of the game and ask how many sudden deification types are there? There's one sudden death location type. This is a location. If you walk into it, you're gonna die and you get a special message for that. And this is gonna be you cannot swim and swiftly drown some kind of water feature. Then I ask how many location types there are in this game? There are four types of location. The first type are the mountains. And once you describe the name, the type of the location, it says, what do you go on the mountains? Do you go in the mountains or can't you enter the mountains? In this case, you can, can't enter the mountains. They're there to make the square map or the rectangular map a bit less obvious. Obviously, you did enter or nothing because you can't enter the mountains. Here's where you enter the, if you enter a very high object number, that means the instant death to enter such as the gorge from the hall of the exile. Here is the plane you go on the plane. Can you dig on the plane? Yes, you can. Would you did it enter walking on a plane? You don't need anything at all. That's just zero. The last type of location is the lake. You go on the lake, you can't dig in the lake, but you need an object to enter the lake. So this is object number two. Remember if you're going into a very, very high number high, the number of objects you have that be the complete death. But here it's an object that exists object number two. And of course, you've made a list of your objects in advance. I hope so. If you don't have the object, put add message number one, which is you cannot swim and script the dr then you can have special descriptions. These are added to just the locations rather you're on a plane, you might have something else to say. So this will be the first description is there are lakes to your south and east at a certain location. We put, put out a bit more information. Now are we creating a grid or non grid locations? If you create a grid, it sort of set all the exits for you, which makes life a bit easier. Here, we're having a nice simple grid. As we see from the map, we are three locations east west and four north south. So what it will now do is create all the exit. It's so from a position one, you go north and go east and so on. Now location one is mounted mounted are impassable. How many objects there are? There are five objects in the game. How many object descriptions? These add a bit more flavor to the game. You have two object descriptions. So when you look at an object you're told it's dimension, it's also a bit of extra information. So the first object is the fossil. This is the ultimate goal of the game. Is there a description? Nah Can't be bothered with that. Then you need to know how long it is, if objects are too large, you can't pick them up for a, an object of one cubic meter is too big to pick up as is an object greater than 15 kg in weight. But it's only three kg. Is it rigid? If it's rigid? It's good as a weapon. It's resistance is how, how tough it is. So, the fossil is incredibly fragile. Can you eat it? Can you not eat it? Was it poisonous? Is it any good at attacking? Is it good at defending? Could you put things inside it? For example, a car skit or a coffin? Is it in a place or an object? It's in a place it's in a, it's in the quarry which is location number 11. And is it on the surface? Buried a bit or how deep is it buried? And it's buried deep? How many monster types are there? There are two types of monsters in my little game and the first type monster is the jaguar. It's attack values. It's a good song seven attack. It's the F values 15. It's rubbish. How strong is it resistance? That's it. Basically it's health point. Does it have any treasure? No, it doesn't. If you put zero, it doesn't work if you get zero is literally in no place at all. How many are there? You can have multiple copies of the same monster. And after you kill the first, it will move it somewhere else. Finally, we need to know. Where do we start? How much money do you need to win? We need no money in this one. How many objects? Two objects we need the the numbers of these objects. So object number three, which you don't know what it is. And number one, which is the fossil, you need to also go to location number 11, which is the quarry and kill zero monsters. We then get data displayed on the screen. You encourage to either copy the screen or write it down. I took screenshots because this then gets typed in and saved as a scenario file. 82 10 is all the exits between locations. So these are all filled in for you. So the 1st 142001, that means it's mounting to go north to four east to two and here we have the exit statements. You cannot swim and swiftly drown. And finally 88 10 is the numbers of the objects you need to winch. Good day. Cobbers William Orris Tang. Yeah. Today we are going on a hunt but not just any hunt. Oh, no, I made my name hunting the deadly Hori and whacking him with a machine. We're not hunting hunting in today. Today, we are using the machete. We're gonna need special tools, little Hammer, Italian little chisel and a little brush cos today, Cobbers, we is hunting for fossils. Don't confuse your fossil for your raw prawn mate. It's all bony and dry. So dig it up, whack it in a museum and let's get back for some castle made for the scenario as supplied by Mr Spiel. And this gives you a set of data statements. I'm now gonna type some of these in to show you what you get, what you type in and you combine these with the player program in order to get a game you can put in your copyright for Robert Spiel. Hi Bob. Here we are. Here are the data statements, all kinds of numbers. You got the title of the game and the list of objects. This and what we're now typing in is the the list of exits from each room. These are generated by the program for me. So we here, the first data statement is 42001 space space which means uh you go from the first room, you go north to room four east to room two. You can't go south or west and it is terrain type number one, the spaces indicate object needs you to enter and is there a special description or not? Because certain areas can have a special descriptions? For example, the fourth space is 751022 which is to go north to seven east to five south to one. Can't go west and it has description number two and there is no opportunity to enter it. Uncle, if I can decode these, I know how these will work after you typed it all in, you save to tape with um a name that isn't too long. Uh For example, fossil dot If you just save the tape as a program, once that's complete, you need to then load the player program into memory. This is the basic how it knows uh what, how it go North means. You then do a merge command and merge scenario in with it, which we're now doing. And this gets you a game you can actually play. It is a fossil scenario because you are me, you load the player, merge your scenario and then you can run the beauty of spiel. The game starts fossil hunt. You are a paleontologist and are looking for a fossil women to be buried in a remote valley on a plane. Westly high mountain. You can go south to the west, lie High Mountain is a special description and let's go south from the plane and we're on a plane or there's a boat here. We like boats and let's head east from the plate. We're on a lake, we cannot swim and swiftly drown. So let's head south on a plane with a special description. Let's head south on a plane as a boat. We go south. Let's take the boat first or not always handy. Having a boat. Let's head south. We are a mountains. The mountains were meant to be impassable. Unfortunately, there's nothing in the code to stop you going into impassable terrain and there's nothing in the scenario maker to stop you creating exits to impassable terrain. Fortunately, you can fix it quite easy in the data thing which I've done. But that's gonna be a problem as you get bigger and more detailed grids because it isn't even more complicated to look at which places you have to enter. So we're gonna fix that. First of all in the data statements, coffee maker itself, word up. If you buy this amazing book, even you can write an amazing adventure. Thanks to the amazing Bob Spiel. Yo. So this is the slightly improved scenario maker of S Robert Spiel and with an adventure calling it Tick Tack to Quest, which is American for naughts and crosses and on the left, you can see we have drawn a very simple plan of our adventure. So after the title, we asked to give ourselves an introduction, our introduction is you awake to find yourself on a and crosses board. Two sides are locked in eternal conflict and it's up to you to bring peace to the land or something like that. With a lot of these adventures, the uh plot is something of an afterthought. How many sudden death location types in this game? There are none. Uh the board is fairly open to move around. So there are zero sudden death location types. These are treated specially by the game and how many location types. Well, it's a simple game. You've got two, there are two types of location in our tick tack toe quest. And the first type is just space. It's a normal space you can move into and the game needs to know, do you go on it in it or can't enter it? And this is for use of the preposition when it builds the description. So you go, you go on a space, you can dig on a space you don't need any object to enter. And the second type is the middle, the middle of the board. Either side you can't enter it. You can add descript, special descriptions for certain locations, grid or non grid locations. It's a noughts and crosses play. It's a grid and we know the dimensions of our grid. You add up up to 200 100 locations, 14 by 14 perhaps um limited of 200 based on how it encodes things. So it's three locations, East west, three locations, North, south, it's a square and then starting in the bottom left location which is location number one, I want to know what type it is. Type number one is a space. There is no special description. Type number two is a space, no description. Number three is a space but there is a special description and it's number one, the ground is disturbed here. Location five is the middle which is impossible and nine is also a space with a special description. Number two, this is a blank space. Please wait, we're moving, invalid exits. This is a grid. You can move around between the spaces. You can't leave the grid but also you can't move on to impossible locations. We have two objects with no special descriptions. The first object is a pencil. It is 10 centimeters long, one centimeter wide, one centimeter deep and it weighs 100 g. It is rigid. It is resistance of once it's very fragile. You can't eat it though. It's inedible. It has no attack value, no defense value. You can't put anything into a pencil. Is it in a place or an object? You can hide objects inside of other objects. This thing is in a place past number uh which pa so which place is it in? It's in paste. Number three, the bottom right hand corner and then he wants to know is it on the surface buried a few centimeters deep? Half a meter deep or buried a meter deep. This is buried very, very close to the surface object. Two is gonna be our main weapon for the game. So what will be useful in a naughts and crosses adventure? That will be a rubber except that might sound rude to our American colleagues. So we call it an eraser and this eraser, it's 30 centimeters long and 10 by 10 and it weighs about a pound. It's rigid. It's a very solid rubber. Resistance is how often you can use it before it breaks. This is our main weapon that's gonna be 30 times you can't eat it. The attack value is nine. It's an excellent weapon. It's, it's moderately good defense. It's got three again, it's in a place or an object. We're using a place and we're placing it in location seven which is top left and it's on the surface. They want to know how many monsters there are. There's not in total, but this is how many types of monster. There are two types of monster in this game. The first one is a nought and we need to know given an attack value from 1 to 8 to six is pretty, is pretty strong. Defense value from one is rubbish in defense and resistance is in the middle, doesn't have any treasure when it drops coins, location is any location and you can have multiple copies of the monster for them. And the other monster is a cross, it's less good in attack, but much better in defense. Again, it's got treasure and can be in any location. And again, there are four of them because we are locked in combat. Where do you start? We start bottom left which is location. Number one have victory conditions. You could have a number of coins into victory which could be zero. In this case, it's 25 to get to kill enough monsters to get that many. You could have multiple objects needed to win in this case, it's one object and it's the first object, the pencil we need to find, to find a location to win. We need location number nine, the top right with the pencil and with 25 g in our pocket, we don't have to kill any particular monster. I'm the foremost warrior of the wasteland. I have killed phosphor dogs, mad man and cybernetic Uber beasts. Where's my quest today? Today, you're going on a journey to a tick tack toe board, a giant mint. No, it's American for noughts and crosses. You're making me very class. That's the spirit. You cannot be serious. Be a good warrior. Don't sulk. Oh, all right then. So this is Tick Tato Quest Deluxe. This is my fancies version. I've not done a great deal to it to make it fancy. I've just given it a loading program so you can load it nicely. This has merged the data, merge the player program, but the loader program sets up a loading screen and an attractive font for use in the game. I think it's with text adventures. You can't do a lot with the graphics but having a, a useful font that's still legible is always nice. And I've given a little loading screen. I like doing loading screens. And this one as you'll see depicts the world of tick tack toe quest. We have a limitless plane with some hills in the distance, a bright shining sun and of course the noughts and crosses board and of course, it's Tick Tato quest created with Bob Spiel's Anarchy. Hi, Bob. In case he's watching, this is a code that detects monsters. If there are no monsters in the game, then you just return. Otherwise we go through each monster checking the current location P L against the location of the monster, which is a offset 16 in the monster array. Unfortunately, there's no code here to cater for location zero. You can never go to location zero. Therefore, you can never meet any monster. How could this be fixed? You could decide that there is a one in location charts of it existing. However, what if say you had a large area of sea in which you might have a shark. And then in addition, you had land based areas to zero. The shark may then turn up in the jungle or in the volcano or something, which just wouldn't make any sense. So ideally zero would have special code that would cater for the type of terrain you want to put it in. So rather than it being in location three, it's in the sea, but that's outside the scope of this video. And here we are, we we awake to find ourselves at a noughts and crosses board two sides locked in maternal wall and straight away we've gone north and we find cells facing a cross. I've attempted to draw a cross in 3D style which I think works reasonably well, and the cross is approaching me and I have to try and punch it to death because this is what life is like in the professional world of noughts and crosses and it's grievously wounded. And I'm, I'm rather battered though. So you, you know, think of Frank Bruno fighting a giant X course, I say Andrew perhaps, but I killed it. And after the victory tune, I get to pocket 10 crowns and we see on the floor a hot cross bun this sort of treasure, a crossword drop. I added some extra bits to the game after playing it a few times. And then you added some food, one of which is a hot cross bun with a description being spicy, fruity and tasty cos I am now about to die. So by, by eating this hot cross bun, I get to restore my strength like a north and there's the eraser, we mentioned the razor was the best weapon. But as a player, how do you know this? But if you look at the er razor, I've had to the description of it and for some reason, it seems like an ideal weapon blatant clue, that blatant clue. So now we can head east. Lots of spaces around this face is blank. Very curious. What's our score? 33 33%. We've now moved on to the south of the border and there's a cross here, the ground is disturbed and we're gonna try and hit it with the eraser and I've done a lot of damage immediately and I've killed it. This is why they made a film called a Razor starring Arnold Schwarzenegger because he was wielding a giant rubber. So now I've got lots of gold, 30 crimes, 33%. So I've got enough money to win. Let's now dig with your hands. You can only dig a very shallow. Fortunately, whatever that whatever's there is shadow, which is this pencil not, they don't take *****, take pencil, dear boy. So now look at this pencil. It's sharp but fragile. Again, blatant clue do not use as a weapon. We've ran some more and we have a naught today again, a sort of 3d effect. This is using the curves, which is what I added to the S Robert Spiel drawing system. It doubles the length of the string, but gives you a bit more flexibility. You're not gonna hit this naught with an eraser, killed it. So what you want two blows. No method of. And there's a on the ground. A dough. No, what is a doughnut was a type of food. But I added something where the dough nought has a mysterious filling. I decided that some foods had a chance of being poisoned. And finally we go north to the space, top right hand corner, successfully achieved our aim and bring peace to the land with our pencil. So I think now we can look at a more advanced game. I really like text adventures. They're brilliant. Thanks to Bob Spills. Bob. I could home on my own crikey. The first thing you're going to need is an idea. Get yourself a nice comfortable writing desk, sit yourself down and gather some inspiration. Clear your mind. Let the inspiration flood in. I've always been interested in stories of lost cities and these translate quite well into a text adventure. You have the journey to find it, dealing with with what you find there and then making it home with a treasure with three different phases of the game. What tools do we have to use in the anarchic system? We have monsters. We have instant death rooms. We have rooms that require objects. We have buried objects and we have objects inside. We can't add new verbs, we can't add new exits or change where exits go and we can't change objects into other objects. We can't have objects having longevity unrelated to digging or fighting. For example, we've had a lamp, we can't give it factories that we run out. Maybe start with a bit of a map. What areas are you gonna have in the game? Well, we need a lost city. You need to start somewhere. You're not gonna start in the lost city. So perhaps some kind of coastal town where you maybe you will find yourself on holiday and then you've got the stuff between the lost city and the coast or jungles, swamps, caves, rivers, waterfalls. What sort of monsters might you find in the South American rainforests or? Pranas? Condors? Jaguars. What kind of deaths might you have? You could have drowning rockfall, poison duck. 108 had an idea to put some mazes in where you had to follow a very specific path to get through. I was gonna put three Mas in and for the first one, taking the wrong step would send you back to the start for the others. Though a misstep would be fatal. Fortunately, I remembered that I find these things to be really annoying. But what if there was some kind of way to make them easy? In one of my basic books, I came across conditional strings where you can change the content of a string based on other variables. So why not use the location descriptions in the anarchic system for this? It doesn't work. But the idea is sound. The problem is that the description array is loaded when you run the game. So then the description would never ever appear. However, you can make a very small change to the player program. It does make the game slightly slower but does allow this to work. So back to these mazes, we're using a non grid system. So we have the advantage of entering every exit manually. Correct. Not quite Bob is a very sensible man. And therefore, if you go south from location one to each location two, then from location two, you will go north to location one. What if it was meant to be a one way system, you can have to edit the data statements. One of the advantages of the anarchic system was the more realistic inventory system. It instead of a fixed number of objects, let's say 10 objects, each object had bulk and weight and you couldn't carry too much. But this wasn't really taken advantage of in the public scenarios. So in this one, I created several heavy or bulky objects and made it so you couldn't carry everything at once. You need inventory management. And I wasn't sure until I actually played the game, whether the game was even completed, you will definitely need to do back and forth transporting of items. This leads us to a problem, transporting items through mazes going forward with the correct items, it tells you where to go, but, but on the return journey, it won't tell you where to go and you can't just go the opposite direction of where it's telling you because they go twisty, twisty and turn. So I decided to add a one way shortcut in one location and then justify this with some location descriptions. So, you know, it's there and it makes sense in universe entering the data statements from my screenshots, took me 90 minutes. I then had to make doubly sure that the connections between locations were correct, especially as I had to change some of them. So I merged in this line to make things easier and took notes. All I have to do now is add the graphics for the monsters. Can you really live without it? It's using the Bobs field vector system. You're based on three numbers X which is minus 4 to 5, Y minus 4 to 5. And then a curve enter all the data statements. It then builds the stream, display the string on the screen, the length of the string and a checker. And this here is the terrifying golden man, the ultimate adversary we're going to face and we now have to enter this string of data in a separate window. We need one data statement per monster. We have 11 monsters. You can get around it temporarily by having data 000 and the empty string, strange characters including the graphics eight character which looks like a space but is not a space once you've entered it, create a variable called end string just for convenience. And you can then find out the length of set variable, which is the same as what we entered. Then you need to calculate the check. So to make sure that's OK, set total to zero. And then for the length of the string, add whatever the ask key code for the character is to total, go out for the entire length of the string and then tell you about the end and then hope you've got it, right. Otherwise you have to sort of scan and hope to look for the messages there. If you miss that characters, it will go horribly wrong, but you've got it correct. So let's show you all these lovely data statements from 76 oh one onwards. Aren't these beautiful? You will love these in the game when you play it and all you need to do now is save this as a scenario, merge it into the player program and you, you get to play the game proudly presented in school. Something hidden, go and find it, go and look behind the ranges. Something lost behind the ranges lust and waiting for you go make your way through thickets of Impenetrable jungle. Will you escape the village alive? Avoids deadly quick sand in the swamp. Brave a labyrinth of underground caves and passages all alike. Yes. Scale rocky mountains swept by icy winds only then will you reach your ultimate goal? The fabled lost city of El Dorado. Nearly 80 locations over 20 objects. 16 death scenes. 11 terrifying monsters. One awesome adventure. Now you too can play El Dorado quest. Get yourself over to Jim Blimey dot com. Find his games archive and you can download all the programs you've seen here. It loads quite comfortably on a spectrum. 48 K as you can see here or you can just do speed loading. I have done a nice loading screen. I always think it's nice to have a loading screen. They probably need a loader because they've also given us a nice custom font. We have the standard Snorer's improvements, uh things to make the like your life a little bit easier just to display things and to make sure the game is actually enjoyable. Not just not annoying, but you see here the lost city of El Dorado with the golden man waiting for you, the sun is setting. There's your thick jungle. Can't you feel the urge to get out there? Can't you feel the urge and there at the bottom, we should get a access to that with print hash zero Eldorado Crest from Bob's Bills and Arctic system. After it loads. There's a small pause and then you find yourself with the introductory text on the beach. What do you do? What do you do? I've been lost in this Barry jungle for weeks. Look at me at the right state. I'll tell you something. I don't think flip flops are the right choice for exploring the jungle. I did find some gold but I traded it with a man for a sie. He told me it was really important, more valuable than gold. Oh, I don't know why. Perhaps he thinks I'm gonna go go fencing or something, you know. Oh, well, you, you excuse me, all this running water may make you really need to go back in, into it. Oh.