Adventure Construction Set - Construction System

Construction System

ACS was designed to make tile-based graphical adventure games similar to Smith's earlier games Return of Heracles and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. It was reviewed in Computer Gaming World as an "easy-to-use, albeit time-consuming, means of creating a graphic adventure."

The framework of an adventure built within ACS is organized into the following main categories:

• "World map": This is the top-level map from which characters begin their adventure. The world map differs from other playable areas of the game in that it has no fixed creature encounters, no stacked tiles, quicker movement, it is scrollable, and it optionally may wrap around (have no borders.) Random encounters may occur on the world map, however the game shall switch to a special view to handle the encounter, which plays similarly to that of a "room".
• "Regions": A region is a collection of rooms. A region is a construction concept and does not present itself to the player, except by indirect means such as disk access when traveling between regions.
• "Rooms": A room is a rectangular, tiled area of a size which must fit within the game's viewport. Tiles may be used to make a room look like shapes other than rectangular.
• "Things": A thing is a background tile, obstacle, or collectible item.
• "Creatures"
• "Pictures": These are art assets used by the tiles. For some platforms, four colors are available for images. For the Amiga platform, 32 colors are available, each of which can be assigned to be any of 4096 available colors.

Tiles may be stacked. Only the top tile of a stack may be directly interacted with by the player, however special tiles allow for game-logic to be implemented via the stack. For example, a tile may be set to "Activate All Things at This Place". Tiles may also allow or disallow interaction based on the contents of the player's inventory, or activate if a specific object is dropped on top of the stack..

Spell-effects may be attached to Things.

The game allows for somewhat varied monster AI behavior. A creature may be specified to behave solely as a "fighter" or "slinker", or adjust its temperament based on its condition. In addition, it may be specified as either an "enemy", "friend", "neutral", or "thief", with a total of 8 possible behavioral patterns expressed.

There are maximum quotas applied to most categories in the game (including the total number of unique things, text messages, pictures, regions, creatures per region, things per region, and rooms per region.) These limits restrict the size of adventures. For example, "Each adventure can contain up to 15 regions and each region can contain up to 16 rooms."

ACS included a framework for fantasy adventures, as well as starter toolkits for fantasy, futurist, and "spy" game genres.