Hi Roody,
Yes indeed, that’s what I want too. We’re trying to take out the frustration and chore and improve on the entertainment. We have a dynamic map that draws as you explore. No one should have to manually draw out a game map anymore! You can also “fast goto” using the map. This has been insanely useful in testing.
Here’s an excerpt from The Pawn Map. You can also scroll and zoom. This shot is from the debug version of the forthcoming desktop betas (with room numbers indicated);
For some games, we’re not just planning to repackage them inside a GUI, but to genuinely expand them, adding new content. Corruption is one of those games;
We’ve managed to recover the original source code to Corruption. And we’ve manage to recover and recompile the original build tools. Ho ho!
Rob Steggles, who wrote Corruption, is interested in writing some new content for the game. He wants to expand on some of the areas; the city, the hospital and various other locations as well as improve character depth. I agree that there should be some system that keeps track of what you’ve learnt and what you need to find out. Also, what things you need to do and how they are relevant.
The idea is to add new locations and objects by editing the original fred23 files, and add new hooks to the virtual machine, that trap out of the emulator like “C” function calls. The new bits of story will then be written outside of the original codebase in a familiar language; Lua perhaps.
It could be really cool. I’d like to do the same to the other games if we can recover the source code. All the source code to the newly remastered editions, the original source files AND the tools are going to be open sourced.
Checkout what’s happening on the blog.
Corruption, in particular, had some interesting (for the time) technology. The characters had goal-driven behaviour. Say they had to do A & B then C. They would attempt A, but if you interfere they could get on with B, then come back to A, finally attempting C afterwards. 30 years later, that’s not new, but back then in such limited memory it was definitely pretty cool.
Sometimes they would escape their loops; go crazy, rampaging through the game doing mad things. They could also “solve” map routes. They were able to exploit map “shortcuts” (eg NW rather than N & W), which sometimes meant they could achieve their goals quicker than expected - and therefore thwart the player. Once the cleaning lady climbed down the lift shaft because it was quicker than using the stairs
I’d love to hear feedback on the Android beta of The Pawn.
We’ve been asked about context sensitive word completion for the text entry box. This is a great idea and I’ve been looking into it;
Stuff like this will be added generically to the GUI (with context coming from the game engine), so it will appear as a feature in all releases now and going forward.
All suggestions welcome.