Adventure Creation Kit

Ice Cream Jonsey · Post by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Wed Apr 18, 2007 4:20 pm

All righty, first off, jjsonick has put together a site about the Adventure Creation Kit. It's right here:

http://www.mozomedia.com/ack

... and the app is like Adventure Construction Set, but beefed-up. Looking at it for an hour last night, I noticed differences like how ACK allows you to import the stock graphics from all three of the example games (sci-fi, fantasy and such). It doesn't allow you to use a mouse all the way through, but it allows you to use one more than ACS ever did. Additionally, you can actually get these games to play in this day and age, which is a nice improvement over ACS.

My first question, however, involves placing objects in a room -- I've created a big world map and a region, but I don't seem to get a list of anything to put in the room, except people. That does seem to work. Now, it could be that I simply have no objects defined at the get-go, but after making a chair I thought I did. I'll investigate this further, as it's not like there are 20,000 ACK gurus who are likely to perform a drive-by posting, heh.

Ice Cream Jonsey · Post by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Wed Apr 18, 2007 7:27 pm

"Alt-A" lets you go through the object list, so you can place an object. PROBLEM SOLVED!

jjsonick · Post by **jjsonick** » Wed Apr 18, 2007 8:19 pm

Hooray, ACK promotionage! Note to anyone trying it out, be sure to play the Tutorial game first, it gives you a good overview of ACK gameplay and what you can do with the editor.

When you try out the editor, remember that F1 will get you a specific help screen about the part of the editor you're in (for almost all parts of the editor).

ICJ, about placing objects in rooms, you can use Alt-A through Alt-D to set or change the objects in slots A-D and that way have a handful of objects you can place at once with the A-D keys. I think I ended up just changing slot A most of the time, but in some cases it's handy to set them all.

Yeah, feel free to ask me any questions. Some of ACK's (relatively) advanced features I haven't tested yet, but I've done a fair bit of doinking around with it in the past.

Ice Cream Jonsey · Post by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Thu Apr 19, 2007 11:43 am

jjsonick wrote:Hooray, ACK promotionage! Note to anyone trying it out, be sure to play the Tutorial game first, it gives you a good overview of ACK gameplay and what you can do with the editor.

I died real quick in the tutorial. I will have to give it another shot. Actually, I only fired off one shot at the attacking bunnies, so I literally need to give the game another shot. HONK HONK!

ICJ, about placing objects in rooms, you can use Alt-A through Alt-D to set or change the objects in slots A-D and that way have a handful of objects you can place at once with the A-D keys. I think I ended up just changing slot A most of the time, but in some cases it's handy to set them all.

Aces! This worked out nicely. I find myself making a room, saying, "Hey... this needs a bed!" and then leaving the editor to go make the bed. But it's cool. It really is like a souped-up ACS.

I had always wanted to make a proper game with zombies and this might just be the one. I made a text game a few years ago that had two zombies, but many other monsters. ACK is a good choice for a game with one primary enemy, as I don't believe you have that many possible tiles for graphics. (But I could be wrong.)

jjsonick · Post by **jjsonick** » Thu Apr 19, 2007 12:52 pm

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:I died real quick in the tutorial. I will have to give it another shot. Actually, I only fired off one shot at the attacking bunnies, so I literally need to give the game another shot. HONK HONK!

* Dies in presence of non-pun * ;) Yeah, being ACS-familiar, there's probably not much new in the tutorial for you until the end -- it is pretty short & sweet, though. Caravan might be worth playing or poking around in the editor with, since it uses scripts more than any other example game. It has a annoying number of window-dressing NPCs with nothing to say, however.

I had always wanted to make a proper game with zombies and this might just be the one. I made a text game a few years ago that had two zombies, but many other monsters. ACK is a good choice for a game with one primary enemy, as I don't believe you have that many possible tiles for graphics. (But I could be wrong.)

A zombie game would be awesome (and you could give the player weapons like a chainsaw for melee, shotgun for aimed, and flamethrower for cone-area-effect, etc).

Yeah, you're limited to 240 graphic tiles (the last of which has to be blank). So you could still have a fair number of enemy graphics, especially if you don't use multiple tiles for animations, but you do have to balance that against how many tiles you'd want for terrain, npcs, items, etc.

jjsonick · Post by **jjsonick** » Thu Apr 19, 2007 9:51 pm

Thanks to someone's testing notes on the DOSBox pages, I have a DOSBox config that lets ACK play its built-in sounds & music, and it's now on the site.

I'm proud to announce that ACK sound # 46-GROOVY is in fact Bruce Campbell's immortal rendition of the word from Evil Dead 2.

Ice Cream Jonsey · Post by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Sun Apr 22, 2007 10:55 am

jjsonick wrote:Thanks to someone's testing notes on the DOSBox pages, I have a DOSBox config that lets ACK play its built-in sounds & music, and it's now on the site.

I'm proud to announce that ACK sound # 46-GROOVY is in fact Bruce Campbell's immortal rendition of the word from Evil Dead 2.

All right, time to get this going in DOS Box, then. I'm pumped.