[Coco] CoCo Game "Construction Sets"

[Joel Ewy]

Allen Huffman wrote:
> Okay, folks. Since there aren't alot of us capable of writing a new
> game or whatever from the ground up, how about we work on a
> construction set.  ,,,
> Then, we could work on our own games for fun.  There used to be a
> pinball construction set for the CoCo, and some adventure game
> designers, but those are all I know about.
>
> Thoughts?
>
>         -- Allen
>
I really like that idea.  Actually, I think that an adventure
construction set holds the most short-term promise (though I certainly
wouldn't try to talk anybody out of doing any other kinds) for the
following reasons: 

1.  Action games are mostly fun because of the action.  Interesting and
unique kinds of (playable) action are what is fun.  The graphical
content is almost always secondary.  But the action probably wouldn't
change all that much with an arcade-style construction set.  With
adventure games, assuming that the logic is at least at some minimal
threshold of sophistication, the content is the important part of the
game.  So people with a cool idea, good writing skills, and maybe the
ability to design some good graphics, could make a good adventure.  But
yet another maze game is really just that.  That's not to say that YAMG
can't be fun, but personally, I'd be more inclined to play a new
text/graphics adventure on the CoCo, unless there was something really
special about YAMG.

2.  Arguably, an adventure game generator is easier to do.  We all know
that good action games can be done on the CoCo.  But the CoCo hardware
is really better suited to adventure games, strategy-level war games, or
simulation games.  Generating code to produce good arcade games might be
more difficult than generating code to produce good adventure games.  I
certainly won't say it can't be done!  But I think an adventure
generator would be an easier task to start with.

3.  An adventure generator could be a stepping stone on the way to an
arcade generator.  If a goal of the adventure generator project was to
facilitate making graphic adventures, then sprite code and graphics
format conversion tools could be re-used to make construction kits for
strategy/sim games, and then arcade games.  Other things like disk file
routines, user interface code, Sockmaster-style Hi-color display
routines, and sound conversion and playback code, could also be reused. 
But using these utilities and code snippets first in adventure games
means that they don't have the stringent performance requirements they
would have in action games.  First just make them work.  Then make them
fast.  Then the high performance versions could be back-ported to the
adventure generator.

While there may have been adventure generators in the past, I don't
think any are currently available (unless you include 3rd party
authoring programs for the PC that allow you to write Sierra-compatible
games which might be playable on the CoCo 3 -- but that should be worthy
of our consideration too), and I bet we could make a better one today
than what was available back then.

JCE
>
> -- 
> Coco mailing list
> Coco at maltedmedia.com
> http://five.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/coco
>