The Fiction of Champions

I have started an Interactive Fiction game using the ADRIFT authoring system. ADRIFT hasn’t the best reputation in the IF community. It is a commercial product, and this seems to be the root of much negativity, other IF authoring systems are freeware, whereas you can develop in an old version of ADRIFT for free or pay £10 to author in the lastest version. Personally I’m happy to support shareware. However the advantage of open-source systems is interpreters are easily created for a range of platforms, and adding libraries is straightforward. ADRIFT has few non-Windows interpreters and adding libraries is impossible. Another source of criticism is the development model, other IF systems are verb-based programming languages, ADRIFT is a form-based task-orientated system which easy-to-use, but lacks lacks precision. To write a literature-orientated game in ADRIFT would be tricky, but to write one full of objects, characters, and locations is simplicity itself. The final objection to ADRIFT is the simplicity of creating a basic text adventure. Too many people have created tiny, untested, games and released them to a weary public. Indeed the IFComp has a regular entrant who uses the ADRIFT system to create a tiny game that usually doesn’t even work. Personally I’ve found it refreshing to ignore learning yet another programming language and dive straight in to creating the game itself, I’ve always believed software should make life for users and developers easier, not more difficult.

Anyway, to my production. The tag Deathtrap Dungeon might have alerted some of you to the content. For those of you who don’t know Deathtrap Dungeon was a “choose your own adventure” book by Ian Livingstone, part of an incredibly successful Fighting Fantasy range published in the 1980s and early 1990s by Puffin, and re-printed a few years ago by Wizard (note: not Wizards of the Coast). The founders of FF, Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson (not the same Steve Jackson as the US game designer of the same name) also founded Games Workshop in 1975 and launched White Dwarf magazine, the two major UK fantasy product brands. There is a Games Workshop in every town in the UK, some 120 branches, and a good number overseas in America, Japan, and in continental Europe.

The first FF book, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, published in 1982 was a spectacular success; thereafter they published around sixty books, just under half of which Ian or Steve penned. Confusingly, three of the books were written by the American Steve Jackson. Deathtrap Dungeon sold over 300,000 copies in Britain alone, the most successful of the series. I got a copy on the year of it’s release at the tender age of thirteen and loved it to bits. The book is incredibly difficult, one of the highest kill-to-win ratios of any FF book, certainly the most “instant death” sections. Even if you choose the “correct” path the chances are one of the creatures you have to fight in combat will kill you. Fair it is not, but it’s an amazing experience when you finally complete it. The book spawned a sequel, Trial of Champions, and that in turn spawned Armies of Death. Whereas Trial has a return to a modified version of the dungeon, Armies sees the victor of Trial raise an army, the only FF book to have a war theme. Deathtrap Dungeon was made into an “offical” computer game, published by Eidos, but it bears no resemblence to the book, being something of a Tomb Raider incarnation.

My adventure, based loosely on Deathtrap Dungeon and Trial of Champions is still small, only a couple of locations written, and those mainly for test purposes, but I’ve spent thirty or so hours learning the ADRIFT language and writing the combat and inventory systems, as well as introduce an alignment mechanism. FF has three attributes, SKILL, STAMINA, and LUCK. Combat is based on opposing SKILL rolls (SKILL + 2d6) but I’ve modified that slightly to introduce the concept of ATTACK SKILL (dependent on your weapon) and DEFENCE SKILL (armour based). The other novelty is the alignment system, familiar to players of Dungeons & Dragons. You start off neutral but performing good and bad deeds, e.g. helping or attacking defenceless people, shifts your alignment towards Law or Chaos. The alignment affects how some of the more powerful creatures react to you, as well as how Holy or Unholy weapons and armour function.

I’m quite happy with the combat, inventory, and alignment systems, they work well, they’re robust, and they can easily be added to as I introduce new items or encounters. I’ve started writing some of the major NPCs, and figuring out how to make them react appropriately. Again I’m quite happy I’ve got the basics of that done, so I should soon be able to start writing the dungeon-crawl proper. While some of the locations, items, and NPCs will be familiar to anyone who has played the books, they will be changed radically. No experience of the books will be required to play the game.