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