Interview with Martyn Westwood of Interactive Technology @~Hello, Martyn. First of all, would you like to tell us a little @~bit about yourself? Whenever I get asked that I always think of the "What's your favourite flavour jelly..." series of questions! Well, I'm 21 and single though I have no middle initial, and have no degrees in Cybernetics or Computer Science! I'm a Leo, love parties and twenty pound notes, and have a fear of wide Sellotape. @~How did you first get interested in computers - and adventures in @~particular? Completely by accident. I first got into computers when I was about eighteen. One of my friends disappeared for about six months, and when we tracked him down, we found him with a computer, a Commodore 16, which was pretty new then. At first we used them to play arcade games (I, and another friend, bought the same computer), but after a while I found a game called "The Williamsburg Adventure" (actually, I found a puzzled friend who'd just bought the game trying to work out what it was!). After I'd solved that (by looking at the BASIC code!) I started to get interested in doing the same kind of thing myself, being a writer and interested in the potential of the medium. Unfortunately, I'm totally untechnical, and so BASIC has always been my limit. So my first game, a tedious affair called "Countdown", was very crude, in fact I never even completed it. But from Commodore 16 I went onto Atari XE, wrote some more complex, and better, adventures, but played only one or two adventure games, which weren't much better than mine. Then, luckily, I happened to see an ad for "The Worm in Paradise" in Atari User. The game sounded interesting, and the system a lot friendlier than the ones I was used to, so I bought a copy. Well, from then on I was completely hooked, going on to a Commodore 64 on which I played more adventures, including the excellent "Dracula". I also got a copy of GAC, and began to write better technical adventures almost immediately (although "Westleigh", originally an Atari XE game and my first GAC project, is something I'd rather forget about!). Then I wrote "The Dance of the Vampires" and "Dead End", which took up about a year in all. Failing to have them published, and seeing the reviews those games received when I put them out on the "homegrown" circuit, I began to think about publishing them myself, professionally. "A Dark Sky Over Paradise" was coming to completion about the time I made the final decision (the winter of 1988), and the ill-fated original "Doom" was under design, too. Up until then, though, I'd never had a disk drive, and therefore, I hadn't seen an Infocom game, though I'd certainly heard about them! One of my first purchases when I did buy a drive (in mid-1987) was "Stationfall", a great taste of the Infocom style, and this game really gave me the inspiration to keep writing games; I felt I could write just as good a game as Infocom! @~You've used STAC for your current games and used that to develop @~your own ZEN system. What's so special about ZEN? I've always been irritated by the crudeness of GAC and STAC. What Sean Ellis (the designer) has done is to create a strait-jacket for the game designer. With GAC he did a great job. You can't do much with that at all (although my BakPak routines do spice it up a bit). With STAC, however, there is a lot more room to do things you're not supposed to. For instance the movement routines are more open, you can throw things in while the movement is being calculated. Though it has to be said, most people who use STAC take it at face value, and the games they produce tend to look as if they've come off a production line. ZEN takes STAC and shakes it; thoroughly. In fact, any game produced under the system is unrecognisable from the basic STAC system. Some of its features are an automatic mapping facility, built-in hints, extensive artificial intelligence, interactive intelligent characters, and many types of objects, not the standard one found in the basic STAC system. For instance there are three types of containers. OPEN/CLOSE containers, OPEN/CLOSE/LOCK/UNLOCK and "eternal" containers, ones that are always open, and can't be closed (such as a flower-pot). There are doors, surfaces (which you - and the characters! - can sit on, or put objects on), clothes and keys. The artificial intelligence bit is perhaps the most important. When non-adventurers talk about text-based games, they always accuse them of being very difficult to interact with. ZEN acts as a kind of "red carpet" for adventurers. If you type in a command that it doesn't entirely understand, or isn't possible because other actions haven't been carried out, it'll do its best to help you, for example, if you want to go through a door, a conventional adventure might read something like this: >EAST The east door is closed. >OPEN DOOR [Which door, the east or the west door?] >EAST The east door is locked! >UNLOCK DOOR [Which door, the east or the west door?] >EAST You don't have the key! Frustrating, eh? ZEN would do it like this: >EAST [Unlocking the east door with the small key first.] [Opening the east door first.] You enter... It pops up in many different gameplay areas, too. Here's another example: Suppose you've opened a chest, see a ring in it, but, thinking it wasn't important, you've closed the chest and turned your attention to something else. Then you come across a circular indentation in the wall, you decide the ring would fit right in there. In a conventional adventure, you'd have to open the chest, (maybe unlocking it first), then take the ring before putting it into the indentation. ZEN would do it like this: >PUT RING IN INDENTATION [Unlocking the chest with a bronze key first.] [Opening the chest first.] [Taking the ring first.] You slip the ring into the indentation... All in all, ZEN is probably the most advanced text-based system around! @~Due to the time you've spent developing ZEN, I suppose you haven't @~any plans to change over to ST PAW when it finally comes out? I didn't even know it was on the way! The problem with the computer industry is that products are often promised when the work hasn't even begun on it! I keep all thoughts of future packages out of my mind, you can too easily find yourself wasting valuable time wondering about something that may not even come out! But, if it does surface, I'll consider it. But it'll have to be an unusual British product for me to change over to it. By that I mean it'll have to be well thought-out, and give flexibility, as well as some pretty incredible built-in features. For example, I'd like the graphics to be re-sizeable according to the designer's taste; I'd want to have the picture filling the top of the screen, border to border or filling the right hand side of the screen, with the text on the left or taking up the top right hand corner etc. I'd like to be able to use the border for an Infocom-like edging, have eighty as well as forty column text in the status line, incorporate digitised sound, working on an interrupt, in the game, have a menu system for command entry etc. etc. @~You have used digitized pictures to good effect in your previous @~games. What are your views on graphics in adventures? That's a well-worn subject. But I feel the whole argument boils down to one conclusion. We all love good illustrations, and detest bad ones. Good pictures can add so much to the game, whereas bad ones can destroy the atmosphere completely. That's why "Dead End" has illustrations throughout, and "Paradise" only has three. Those in "Dead End" do add a lot to the game, but the "Paradise" ones are there as much to get a bit more space in the magazine reviews, which is crucial, than to add to the story. Maybe I'm biased because I'm a writer, but I do feel that pictures can't do the job of text. A good screenful of text takes about 300 bytes, and can describe the kind of scene a picture would need a hundred times that amount of memory to rival, even with the best artist to provide it. If you look at the games that do rely on pictures-only (the Sierra games and Lucasfilm's "Loom") you can't fail to be struck by the cartoon look to them; you can't write a truly serious game with those kinds of graphics. And to put a game together with really top-quality graphics would be far too expensive, take about a year of intensive work to complete, and would need a CDI set-up to handle all the data. Text with graphics is the winning compromise, and with "Hound of Shadow" and "Demon's Tomb", we're beginning to see that conclusion being drawn by the main publishers. @~I know you must have fairly detailed plans before you start to @~write a game, but do you find many changes in plot or content @~coming in while you're writing it? Of course. I always begin a project by designing the text on AMIGA, researching it along the way, with the puzzles starting out back-to-front, with the result of the puzzle being solved! Weird Tales, for instance, started out based upon "windows" on the scenes from the stories, without proper room descriptions, just with a basic notification of characters and objects present. When I came to implement the game I found that approach to be too "dry" for the game I wanted. The whole beginning to one of the stories was re-written on at least two occasions, and another story was never the same from one week to the next! When I'm writing a game I end up in one of two states, either feeling as if the game is an extension of myself, or trying to get into that state! The buzz of creativity is the time when the inspired work happens, when the puzzle I've been worried about for weeks is taken out and a new one put in, and a week's work is completed in a day! The plan's always massively important though. Writing a game without a detailed one is like building a tower block without a blueprint! You'll get started quicker but you'll finish it a lot later (if at all)! @~What are your future plans? Ah, an easy question at last! To get back to work on the next project probably! The stories written under ZEN are going to be much more complex than before. From now on, every Interactive Technology story will be ST only, and will come on at least one full single-sided disc. Although Weird Tales, the first story to use the system, will come on at least two. Also the standard of packaging will continue to increase, too! But I'd love to find someone who has the technical knowledge to put into practice all the design ideas I've got in mind. I've got some pretty incredible ones for Incentive's Freescape system just waiting to be realised that would really stretch it! @~Is there a particular adventure you wish you'd written yourself, @~and why? Well, my bank manager would probably prompt me by saying the Zork series for all the money they must have brought in. But maybe "The Hobbit" for the revolutionary things that brought with it. Or "The Witness" for the superb detail. Or my two all-time favourites, "The Worm in Paradise" and "Shogun". But then, wouldn't it be great to have written the original "Adventure"? To sit back and look at what that one game inspired must be a rewarding experience in itself. If it wasn't for that game, I wouldn't be doing this, you wouldn't be reading these words, and SynTax wouldn't exist! @~Perish the thought! Well, finally, what do you like most and like @~least about writing your own adventures? The satisfaction of looking at a complete game, packaged and ready to go out for review, is a great antidote for all the problems I've had to go through during development. The particular down- side to that is waiting for the reviews, and knowing that my "baby" is going to have to make it in the world alone; my work is pretty much complete, apart from minor changes that can be made, the game is done. Also, not having any input in the reviews is difficult to handle. If it's a good review, I'm happy enough to just grin, and if possible thank the reviewer. Luckily enough, almost all of them have been very good. But when I do get a bad review, when I'd like to have some kind of reply printed in the magazine, all I can do is, if possible, thank the reviewer for giving space to the game. That's not to say, though, that I don't take any notice of bad reviews, I do. But the only bad review I've had in about 10-15 magazine reviews was one that didn't contain any constructive criticism; that does no-one any good. But I suppose there has to be a draw-back to working in such an interesting field; I just hope everyone who buys an Interactive Technology game finds the kind of enjoyment I'm trying to give them! @~I'm sure they will, Martyn, and thanks a lot for taking the time @~to talk to us.