On Wed, 24 Feb 2010, bloomer_au wrote:
Ugh, that sucks you lost them!
Yeah, I had them on a large shelving unit but moved them down to the floor because I needed to get something in behind. I forgot to put them back up into the shelving unit and we had a really huge rainstorm that night. When I went down to check the basement the next day, it was over a foot deep and numerous magazines, printouts, the game disks and most everything on the lower shelf of the unit was submerged.
I also did the making maps and advance planning method. My program design came from usborne's 'How to write adventure games' book. I guess I made about 5 or 6 games using that system. Probably only the last 2 were really worth playing for strangers, but the programdatabases were so large at that point that there was a huuuuge pause after you entered each command.
I've always admired the programming that must have gone into the game "Sherlock Holmes: Another Bow." The game was set on a cruise ship at the turn of the century and had graphic still-screens that overlap to help tell the story in the top half of the screen while the bottom half of the screen was the running text with the storyline and various dialogue of the characters including your input.
The best thing about this game was that events occured whether you were there to witness it or not. In one walkthrough, on the third day, I was up on deck, speaking with Ensign Lawrence, when the life raft above us let go. I pushed Lawrence out of the way and he was so grateful that I saved his life that he told me to go the dining room at noon and look for certain people, at which point, I (as Holmes) could eavesdrop on their conversations for further clues.
On the second walkthrough (not having saved that particular boot of the game), I was in the dining room on the third day, having gone a different route that morning, when I heard two women talking about how Ensign Lawrence was hurt very badly by a life raft that had fallen on him earlier. Wow! Events occur even when you're not there to witness it or interact with it. That's good programming. The variables table must have been humungous to take in all the various possibilities yet it fit nicely on one 143k single-sided disk.
Tony