ACS: Chan's Ambition (2018)

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Keighn
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Re: ACS: Chan's Ambition (2018)

Post by Keighn »

I’ve been going through the original acs fantasy, sci-fi , spy/mystery, lands of Adventuria, Rivers of light and recording information and creating tilesets. I’ll have to do that for all version (appleII, dos, Amiga) but they should be similar (except tilessets).

I’ll pop one of yours open as I’m curious if you used fantasy, sci-fi, or spy/mystery. I discovered the c64 spy/mystery is severely lacking tiles. It has maybe 22 out of possible 46 in Creatures and some duplicate things/items tiles. Science-fiction is missing some monsters as well and possibly items. Fantasy is missing a monster and some items. They might not be so much missing as incentive to create but when looking at Apple or dos or Amiga and they appear short on c64.

So, I’ll take a crack peek and see. Eventually I’ll post my own artworks at joltcountry. I still haven’t seen a huge pickup of people interested but I haven’t actually spread word via the various net media either. I have to do the work to get what I have sorted out so maybe people will take interest.


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Baber64
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Re: ACS: Chan's Ambition (2018)

Post by Baber64 »

Hi Keign.

I modified the graphics a bit over the years, creating pictures as needed. I like the graphics editor, although it is clearly based on the Apple ][ graphics card. :-D

The first adventure is "Jadeworld 1a", and "Mushitsu" is a standalone Japan-historical game with ninjas and samurai and "foreign devils" (westerners).

The second attempt at a gaming system was "Jadeworld II", which revolves around the Oriental Heroes comic book. That's where Heroes0-5 is set. Heroes0 I have described above. Heroes1 starts in Japan with various adventures taking them across the Pacific to Thailand where the majority of stories in Oriental Heroes the comic book take place. The features of this game engine are "corpses", which have weight and you can turn them into the store for a "bounty". I thought that was a neat twist on the concept of treasure.

My third attempt at an ACS gaming engine was "Jadeworld III". Here, poison melee weapons take a larger role, and the low-level thugs and brigands had more detail put into their combat system. This one is based on the "Force of Buddha's Palm" comic series, which featured a greater emphasis on everlasting missile skills that are very dangerous at higher levels. I also utilized more poison "life sapping" spaces to deadly effect.

The culmination of this game system is "Buddha4.d64", where you play the villain of the comic series, White Crane. He receives a final moral punishment at the end of the game, which has a trick to winning but you have to know about randomly-appearing creatures to build up your wisdom for the final battle.



Adventure Construction Set on the Commodore 64 has one game-ending bug: If you over-use summoning spaces or items in the game, it can crash the game engine and worse, saves the damaged changes forcing you to start over with a fresh save disk. Of course thanks to digital downloading, you can always start over fresh after a "corrupted" game disk. But otherwise, a very entertaining game with ACS once you bypass the bugs and limitations of the format!

Regading the Spy/Mystery set: I've never used it. It's main selling point is a Space where you drop a coded message, and it "decodes" the coded message. Other than that, I never based a game on it.
Keighn
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Re: ACS: Chan's Ambition (2018)

Post by Keighn »

^^^^^yes this.

My Pa created an adventure called the Time Warp or something. It had monster summons on doorways, and other places. Items over filled the regions causing crashed and corruption like names that were symbols/letters/numbering jibberish. It’s pretty weird.

There is a recent construction bug in the editor I found as well. Basically a one-way portal with attached long message is the issue. You can place it and write the message but don’t ever try to edit it. It will crash/freeze. It works fine in gameplay. I found this out by going through the modules that you make with ACS. Land of adventutia deals with a wizard named wis’strik thee is and his time machine between dank dungeon and save the universe in the crystite mines. I recreated it on a blank adventure finally and recorded that. Odd stuff.

I’ve finished the Apple fantasy terrain and am working my way through. It’s slow since printscreen or apple screenshot isn’t effective at all. Nope, I have to manually make a ms-paint tileset if I’m going to transplant to other platforms or engines like ACK.

It’s a fun deviation. I still hope to finish the People/Places/Things manual for each theme and more. To have a fully indexed account of everything would be cool and isn’t currently available. Maybe I can make it a pdf eventually.
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Baber64
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Re: ACS: Chan's Ambition (2018)

Post by Baber64 »

Checking my notes from 1993, I considered the "summoning bug" on Jadeworld II a game-ending problem, and stopped the project. I came back to it a few months later and successfully made more game modules. Of course!

Have a good weekend.
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