Making your first Adventure
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(this is all based on a tutorial found in the Amstrad action magazines after they gave away a copy of Graphics adventure creator on a covertape.)

Lets make a simple two room adventure with one object for now.
(make sure QS.ADV is loaded before you start)


First rooms
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Press 'R' and choose room 1
write in the description something like You are in a large bank vault then press enter

When it says Connections are... Type East 2 and press enter
(When you type 'East' it will go to room 2. I bet you knew that.)

Which picture goes with this room? well you don't have any yet so type 0 and press enter.

Now make a room 2 and type You are in a bank Connections are West 1 (so you can go back) and again no picture.

Pressing ESC goes back to the menu. You can test your adventure now. Very basic stuff. How about making an object? Escape back to the menu.

Objects
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Press 'O' for objects. It's much like making a new room. We want to make object 1 A gold bar. Put it in room 1 and make it weigh 1.

You wont be able to do anything with it at the moment so go back to the menu and choose Nouns. Type 1 gold and press enter. And add more if you like. Someone might type 'get bar' So type 1 bar. Everything that is no.1 will represent the same object.

Now you need to add conditions that let you pick up and drop the object. Go to low priority conditions. (keep in mind that the bracket keys are different on an Amstrad cpc, Shift + 8 is '(' and Shift + 9 is ')'

Lines 1 to 7 are already taken, so choose 8 this time and type in

IF (VERB 7 AND NOUN 1 AND HERE 1) GET 1 OKAY END

What the heck is does that mean? Well...

Verb 7 is 'get' or 'take'
noun 1 is 'gold' or 'bar'
and here 1 checks the room to see if the object is present.
and if so, GET object 1 (object 1 is gold).
Display 'okay'
end of line

So this allows you to pick up the object and move around with it. But we need to be able to drop it too. So in line 9 type

IF (VERB 8 AND NOUN 1 AND CARR 1) DROP 1 OKAY END

Verb 8 is 'drop'

Thats not all though. Most text adventure let you examine an object. The QS file had set up most of that for us but we still need to write in a message to be displayed for our objects and the condition to make it all work.

Go back to the menu and go to messages.

Message 1 should be something like, It looks like it could be worth thousands!

Press enter then escape to the menu and go back to the low priority conditions again. Line 10 should be

IF (VERB 16 AND NOUN 1 AND AVAI 1) MESS 1 END

Verb 16 is 'Examine' and mess 1 is message 1.
Avai 1 checks to see if you're carrying object 1 or not.

Testing time!
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Ok now you can test your adventure to see if it works right.


Using the Graphics editor.
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This is rather fun to use despite being very very old. Amstrad cpc mice were very uncommon and so this editor doesn't support them. Pictures should be rather basic anyway given the memory limitations.

Choose room 1

You will be able to see a cursor in the middle of the screen. Use the cursor keys to move it. It's very slow i know. Holding shift moves it a little faster. And pressing Alt (copy on a real Amstrad) toggle the pen on or off.

You can see the options at the bottom of the screen.

Change = Changes one of the 4 colours to something else. The Amstrad cpc is limited to a total of 27 colours and GAC uses a graphics mode that only allows 4 colours on screen at once. I don't know the colours for each Key. Some are a combination of flashing colours. I usually stuck to the default colours.

Dot = A single pixel.

Ellipse = Circle drawing much like any graphics program.

Fill = Fills in an area with current colour.

Ink = Changes current colour

Picture = Lets you take another picture as a template than draws over it. Useful for a game if you want a border or lots of similar rooms with similar but slightly different pictures. Clever.

Rectangle = Self explanatory

Shading = Chooses two colours for dithering.

Delete (remapped to Backspace) = Undo last action - also the only way to delete a picture if i recall.

Whole pic = Redraws picture

Have fun!

Remember you set each room a picture via the room descriptions.