Hi guys (Jamie and MPK in particular). Thanks for reviewing and enjoying my little haunted house adventure created on GAC, - THE HOUSE THAT WEPT. :)
Despite the crappy basic lineart graphic...
Maybe I should explain this for the general casual adventure games out there. ;)
The reason why the graphics are simple is because, due to the GAC’s memory limitations, after writing all the internal conditions that ensure the game’s mechanics, I’m usually left with only 2 or 3Kb to draw graphics for all the locations.
Another thing players don’t realize is that GAC consumes memory much faster with text than with graphics.
Which means that even if I gave up the simple graphics, it actually wouldn’t make a difference in the size of the descriptions, and I couldn’t use that memory to expand the text.
Just writing a single paragraph would use up those 3Kb. So it’s always better to spend those 3Kb on drawings — no matter how simple they are, they always help the player get oriented — rather than spending 3Kb on text that would disappear in just one or two sentences.
What players don’t know in my GAC adventures is that 70% of the 21Kb of memory I have for each game is always used on programming logic conditions that ensure the structure has no gaps.
I have to anticipate things, actions, or words that the player might try to type, even if they never end up using them.
There’s a lot of complex logic behind the apparent simplicity that the player sees on screen. And that’s where almost all of the game’s memory goes. Then about 25% goes into the short descriptions which, even though they’re telegraphic, still use up a lot of memory with each sentence. Sometimes I even have to decide whether or not to add a comma in a description, because even that small detail will cost memory in bytes that I might need later for a detail in an image.
The remaining 5% of memory — after descriptions and programming — if I’m lucky, goes toward graphics. In this case, and in my most recent adventures, they’re purely functional.
In my adventures Shangri La and Eclipsia, the graphics looked better because the narrative structure of those games was simpler to program. There were fewer things in the story structure I had to account for, and fewer things I knew players might try to type that would cause an error. In these newer games, because the worlds are more open, the number of invisible conditions I had to create has quadrupled.
In my most recent adventures, where I try to create a more open map with freedom of movement beyond just the puzzles — like A Terrific Weekend Adventure or Echoes of Atlantis — most of the memory was taken up by internal logic conditions to ensure the player could explore as freely as possible without getting stuck in or by a puzzle.
Above all, what interests me in my games is telling stories.
In fact, the initial texts are much more complex than the telegraphic descriptions used in the adventures, because I usually end up writing a book based on those ideas.
So that’s why my most recent games have basic graphics, but they also don’t need to be purely text-based games.
Text uses a lot of memory in GAC, whether it’s description text or internal condition text.
So for me, the real challenge is creating a narrative within 21Kb.
Besides, I love GAC because it’s an excellent notepad for planning book structures that can become games — or vice versa: ZX games that can become books.
--
On a personal note here, aimed at my Portuguese audience that keeps asking me the same obvious question I need to explain...
The reason I always write in English ( and do NOT do games in Portuguese at all ) actually comes down to two things:
The main one is that I use the games to promote my illustration website, www.icreateworlds.net, which is where my daily work comes from.
But the second reason I always write in English and not Portuguese — which I could easily do — is very simple, and something most people wouldn’t even imagine.
It’s that, in terms of memory, writing using GAC in English uses less memory than writing in Portuguese — or probably in Spanish too, since they’re similar languages. Let me explain.
For example, the verb get in English uses 2 bytes, but the same verb in Portuguese, apanhar, has twice as many letters, which means it uses 6 bytes. Now imagine this difference across the entire game. There are sentences in English that use between 10 to 12 bytes, but their Portuguese equivalents might use between 30 and 60 bytes — just to say the same thing.
It’s all because the sentence structure of the English language is much simpler and more economical in how it conveys information.
That’s why GAC is great for writing adventures in English, but not at all suited for Iberian languages.
In terms of memory, GAC is simply not designed for large adventures in any language other than English.
For that reason, when people ask me when I’ll have a Portuguese version of my games, the answer is that they probably wouldn’t even fit in GAC if translated. So instead of doing a simple translation, I’d actually need to rewrite the entire game from scratch to "convert" the internal structure itself, adapting it to Portuguese and how it uses memory so extremely.
In fact, just the direct translation would almost double the memory used compared to the English version.
All my games use GAC memory to the absolute limit. For example, in The House That Wept, I had just 1 byte left.
The worst thing about GAC is that when you go over the available memory, the program crashes and can even destroy the entire code. You have to be very careful, and everything has to be thought out down to the last byte to make sure that doesn’t happen.
And when I normally have only 2 to 3K per game to sometimes draw graphics for 30 to 50 locations, it becomes very hard to manage.
And that’s it.
Once again, thank you for talking about my game. More are on the way, and I think this helps people better understand the reasoning behind my visual choices — the kind of decisions people never imagine when they see the visual simplicity of the final result.
One day I may try to create an adventure using some other thing other than GAC,
but for now I love it because its the perfect "sketchbook" to plan stories. Super fast to program, simple to structure a story that can be converted easily into a book and it gives me the same joy as it did back in 1990.
In short, thanks for enjoying the game. And check out my other games.
--
Keep that magazing going. I love the variety of content you included and it´s super informative.