Adventure Developing and Playing Toolkit

ADePT

ADePT is a toolkit to play adventure games and to develop adventures yourself. In an adventure game, you have to explore an unknown world, solve several puzzles, and experience a story as the main actor.

The game interface of ADePT adheres to the traditional point and click metaphor. You can use several tools to explore and manipulate the different scenes simply by pointing and clicking at the regions of the scene with your mouse. Take objects and store them in the inventory for later use. Talk to other characters and take track of your progress in the diary.

The language to create adventure games follows the way adventure games are played. Games are rather described than programmed. The main concepts of the language are the same as in the game interface: scenes, regions, dialogs, objects, and their manipulation by the player using tools.

For more information, have a look at the documentation or download the toolkit and some games or the demos and play.

Features

Game playing interface:

• pure point and click interface
• individual menus
• different views: scenes, dialogs, inventory, and diary
• graphical scenes as the places of the story
• free controlable player character with perspective sizing
• region description for mouse position: you know where you click
• many different kinds of possible actions
• different tools: e.g. for walking, viewing, taking, using, and talking
• dialog mode for conversations with speech and animations
• separate inventory: store, examine, and combine objects
• close up views and manipulation of objects in inventory
• diary to remember important events: automatic and manual entries
• sound, music, animations, video, CD audio, and true type fonts
• multiple language support
• adjustable look of the interface: change colours, icons, and text font
• editor for looks

Game developing language:

• simple, generic, object-oriented language
• direct mapping of game interface concepts onto language concepts
• very dynamic game structure: actions are not procedures, but changes of game itself
• compiler for translation into games
• support of common file types for images: bmp, ico, cur, wmf, jpg
• support of common media types via MCI: e.g. wav, mp3, mid, avi, mpg
• many configurable properties to design look of game freely
• arbitrary set of free defineable tools, separate for scenes and inventory
• scenes may be composed of several images including text and images with transparency
• adjustable brightness and colour filters for scenes
• definition of regions in scenes by geometric shapes or transparency of images
• scaling of images and regions
• timers for animations
• basic mathematics and variables for advanced control
• support of different language versions by text mappings
• packing of text and images in compressed resource files
• editor for scene layout (under development)
• debugger with region highlighting, action tracing, error messages, and variable values
• controller for instant access to scenes, dialogs, and inventory
• many examples including source code
• a step by step tutorial

If you write an adventure game and need a new feature or just want to suggest some improvements, send me an e-mail to adv@sesseler.de.