Adventure Game Toolkit - American Shareware

The Adventure Game Toolkit (AGT) is an American adventure creator
written in Turbo Pascal by David Malmberg and developed from the
Generic Adventure Game System (GAGS). With it, you can create
your own text-only adventures whose style and appearance can have
a lot in common with Infocom games.

The final games are stand-alone and come in two forms. The first
is called standard level. This requires no programming knowledge
and will produce a basic but competent game. The professional
level games require more expertise but are still not too
complicated to create, and the beautiful thing about creating AGT
adventures is that you write them using a word processor or text
editor as ASCII files; it couldn't be simpler. The finished 
adventure is then compiled.

Of course, one of the prerequisites for writing a terrific game 
is that you must have the ideas for a good story and baffling
problems. As with all other adventure creators, no matter how 
easy to use or expensive they are, if you haven't got the 
imagination then regardless of how long you spend on your game, 
it won't be worth playing. From now on, a good imagination on the
author's part will be assumed!

When you buy AGT, you get two ARCed disks. One contains AGT
itself plus various DOCs and the source code for an adventure 
called "Alice"; 16 files in all. The other contains a further 10
source files, giving you a total of 11 adventures to play - once
you've unARCed and compiled them, and, believe me, that takes a 
long, long time. Luckily there's a program called UNARGHH on the
disk which makes unARCing a lot easier as it uses GEM and a file
selector box instead of the usual TTP command line interface.

Most of the adventures are standard level, and generally they are
written by David Malmberg. Some of them were originally written
by other people but have been converted to AGT by him. All use 
the default colours of black background with cyan text and 
yellow to highlight so after you've seen several of them, the 
display starts to get a bit monotonous. One game, "Sample", is
a shorter version of another game on the disks called 
"Underground Adventure".

The games vary in style and playability. Some are pretty long,
one is the shortest ST adventure I have ever seen (and weird with
it!), another seems to consist of maze after maze. Every so often
you come across one that is a real gem and a treat to play.

The scope of AGT is as wide as your abilities to think up logical
locations and interesting objects. You can have up to 400 words,
200 locations and 100 objects in your game. Objects are defined
according to their properties eg whether you can get or turn them
etc and also according to factors such as weight.

The parser is sophisticated and recognises pronouns (it, him,
them, my, its) and compound commands linked using "and", "then"
or punctuation. Examples of sentences you could use with it are:
"Get the flashlight and then switch it on"
"Place the green rock and the small pebble behind the tree"

In fact, the parser seems to be able to cope with any of the 
phrases found in modern, commercial adventures.

It is also possible to have up to 100 interactive characters in
your game and these can be addressed in the usual way, as in:
"Sulu, set a course for Alpha 14". 
The sample games make good use of interactive characters.

The function keys and cursor keys are predefined for the most
common adventure commands (get, drop, examine, read etc) and
evidently the screen adapts to mono or colour. Not having a mono
monitor, I couldn't check this out. Script and unscript are also
supported.

Because AGT has been developed from GAGS and is compatible with
the latest version of it, there is a wide range of GAGS adventures
that will gradually be made available for the ST. Currently, two
are out on PD, Tark and A Dudley Dilemma. Tark looks especially 
good and both are available from SynTax. Although AGT itself is
shareware, the author is restricting its sale to authorized 
outlets. I have just received permission from the States to 
distribute it through SynTax and have added it and the AGT
adventures to the PD list. 

When I been able to spend more time working with AGT, I will 
write more fully about its capabilities. Until then, I'd guess 
that, if it lives up to its promises as to ease of use, you can 
expect my homegrown adventure in the SynTax PD section sometime 
in the (near?) future, written with AGT.

                                              Sue

@~The Adventure Game Toolkit is available on SynTax PD disk 38
@~The AGT Source Code Disk 1 is available on SynTax PD disk 39
@~A Dudley Dilemma is available on SynTax PD disk 41
@~Tark is available on SynTax PD disk 42
@~Each disk costs œ2.50