The Galleon (1991-93)

Thereby what I imagined, I could only carry out during the next phase. First I always had to thoroughly and entirely follow through each project for the given level of the knowledge and experience to be just ready and clear inside me that was needed for the next step. (I had to be trying – replaying the ready game by me myself again and again – to see where any weak part is still to be fixed.) Some self-teaching and self-developing building process emerged of this after all, as gradually becoming more and more conscious – as also stretching longer and longer simultaneously.

Then the game The Galleon (A gálya) being made for more than two years became such a milestone or a station (I do not dare to say that „peak”), where this inner process luckily met the demands and the actual possibilities of my outer environment: that means it was not only bought and published (by Com-Ware Kft. – or by another name the CoV), but also being purchased (or copied) then by relatively many people, so thus, as a matter of fact, a whole country could know my name. (Even if it seems an exaggeration a bit as basically only speaking of a subculture.) I realized a lot of innovations in this program, too.

Since I felt the plot of the game still too fixed and determined considering the results of Az Alvilág Ura (anyway it is also much like in some Magnetic Scrolls games, and exactly the same trait because of which I felt and by now still also feel unsatisfied with them), I set about to knead a few such other sympathetic features into the system, which were in contradiction with this, from the other greatest example-like computer game family before me, the Melbourne House Tolkien adaptations – and within them in the first place, of course, The Hobbit. Such as: the probability (and – originating from it – randomity) being built in everywhere; the comprehensive self-activity of non-player characters; and some actual incalculability of the game-world continuously and always being under change and move. Furthermore (on another level): the possible loosest separation and disjunction of the elements and episodes of the scenario from each other, the most kinds of alternative solutions or ways, as far as the freest combinability and variability of them with each other, too. (Or, expressing that with other words, and more exactly, the so-called non-linearity.)

It is more or less connected with that by the way I also tried to drift away from the certain habit that the story of the very most games in advance was written from an „invisible” (hidden), yet already fixed and implicitly wired point of view: that is to say, to crash and destroy the ego of the main hero… In present case it means that: there are two different central figures at once, whom are able (and also have) to be contolled in parallel (or, much rather, by turns). (Of course this all required giving different names and exact characters to them, too.) The player may step out of his role this way, and look „himself” from „outside”. Previously adventure games were very rarely marked by this (or anything such like this), since it demands much more work, and far more advanced and thorough planning, forethought during programming. (In a similarly curious and interesting way, this did not even spread or become general in text adventure games much since then, but rather remained only at the graphical games instead – that is also understandable somehow because in a graphical game this outer viewpoint is as already given, as naturally originating from its type. In a text adventure game it is not so obvious.)

I really did my utmost to grammatically develop the parser/interpreter part of the program: there appeared within that e. g. the attributes (in the form of adjectives being put beside the nouns); the freest word-order in pair with the inflexion of words; the possibility of joining several commands in one sentence (separated by a comma or another punctuation-mark or disjunctive); some rather simple usage of the collective nouns and the pronouns; and a somewhat (more) general automatic editing of sentences being used not only for input, but also for display (maybe rather in an initial stage). A similarly unusual innovation was that I wrote it within two different languages in parallel: a Hungarian and an English version both at once. (My non-secret intention was by this to try to sell it abroad, but finally in vain: I did not succeed in finding any publisher.)

By the way, I was increasingly deepening and strengthening the world-model simulating charasteristics further on: the interactions and relations between the objects and the places became more complex (that layeredness again). Each item of the game scene might be connected theoretically with any other else, for example one being on the other, or inside the other (there let be a paper on a table, or a box of matches in a cupboard) etc. Which moreover was recursive, namely they could even contain each other embedded within at several steps. (Some limitations might also shade this more: e. g. that cupboard could be closed or even locked for those things within to „disappear”; or limiting by weight or size etc.) There appeared yonder darkness present at the unlit places, too. Several types of connecting doors, keys, mazes etc. Complicated logical and situation-tasks, puzzles, problems of several factors, constituents, components.

Furthermore I put inside a few controlling curiosities: a new form of motion by which you could get close to any farther places fast – having given the mere aim the program automatically leads along the player through a right way found by itself to there (technically it also needed recursion, with an algorhythm repeatedly calling itself again and again). (There was any „go to” command likewise in some Level 9 games, for example Knight Orc anyway.)

I also tried to adorn this whole thing with some more spectacular exterior (though I was not so talented at this, however, I did everything I could.)

And finally what put the crown upon this all was that I endeavoured exploiting all reachable memory and disk storage places up to maximum (not only some pictures and some texts, but also many executable program codes were continuously being loaded from the disk), and to cram inside a story as far complex as possible, together with the very most of scenes and objects, too… This resulted in a definitely megalomaniac plot, which had – among others – a (still not full yet) solution of almost thirty pages in the ’95 CoV Yearbook (and another special number), in the meantime with a walk-through time stretching as far as even a whole day. (There were very few games of such a size!) Moreover that story all along was satiric (full of absurd, nonsense situations, silly jokes and alike).


  The Galleon (A gálya)
09/01/2011
  
A gálya (The Galleon) (1993)
  

Next: „The Swan-Songs of the C64 Era (1993-96)”

 

 

The Beginning... (1987-88)

The Lord of the Hell (1989-90)

The Galleon (1991-93)

The Swan-Songs of the C64 Era (1993-96)

The Hobbit (1997)

The Tales of the Blood (1997-2001)