Like most things, adventures tend to have a beginning. So does my career in programming games. This is, of course, not the first program I ever wrote, but it is the first game-related thing I did all by myself, so I think it is a suitable feature for the first entry in my very own blog.

And here I’m getting ahead of myself already, you may be wondering what I’m actually talking about. Well, I’m talking about an adventure, of course! To be more precise, about a framework/game engine which allows you to create your very own adventure game without any need of knowing how to code. Sort of like RPG Maker (only I didn’t even know such a thing existed back then).

Now let’s talk some facts about the engine:

• The whole project is written in Delphi (a dialect of Object Pascal, for those of you unfamiliar with the matter)
• The graphics and some of the menu interface are supplied by the Andorra 2D graphics library.
• Features:
  • Character movement
  • Environment interaction
  • Inventory and Item system
  • Dialog system
  • Achievements
  • Quiz and (literal) puzzle minigames
  • Level Editor with some sort of visual scripting system (a system in which you can create chains of events based on certain conditions with just a few clicks. It’s lacking any kind of comfort features, but other than that I found it to work quite well.)
  • A classic text adventure playable within the game, comes with a custom editor to create the adventure.

Unfortunately, there are still some things you can’t do in the editor and have to do manually (these are: creating item definitions for use in the game, configuring the player character and creating puzzles). Since all of these can easily be accomplished by changing a few lines in an .INI file and I was somewhat pressed for time, I didn’t bother creating separate tools for those. Maybe one day when I find the time, I’ll get back to that.

All in all, the complete set of tools took me about one and a half months to create and another two to three weeks to create the accompanying demo game.

Until then, feel free to tell me what you think about it in the comments.

If you wish to try the program (or the little game I created for demonstration purposes) yourself, you may download it right here. And if you want to have a look at the source code (which I honestly wouldn’t recommend since it’s a total mess) and maybe improve upon it yourself, feel free to shoot me a message using the contact form.

And here’s some fancy pictures for you: