A dventure trail

Greetings my fellow adventurers, welcome once more to yet another edition of the Adventure Trail. Colin Bell here, your resident CRASH Dungeon Master and guide to the world of ‘ZX’ Adventure.

This issue we’re doing things a little bit different. My CRASH Ravens are having a well-earned break and instead of my usual round up of news and reviews I’m bringing you an exclusive interview with Frenchman Davide Bucci the author of text adventures Two Days to the Race and last year’s Adventure Trail’s CRASH SMASH The Queen’s Footsteps.

We’ve been a huge fan of Davide’s work for some time now here at CRASH Towers and with his new text adventure ‘Silk Dust’ in development and near completion I thought I’d catch up with him and chat about his games and what inspired him to get in to and write interactive fiction.

Thanks Colin, pleasure to be here! It began in 1985 when my mother bought a secondhand Commodore VIC20 for her work as a teacher and it was on that I had my first experience of BASIC. Then in 1990 I received a bunch of old Italian computer magazines called MC-microcomputer, which contained many type-in programs for my beloved VIC. There were also some interesting articles on what a text adventure was and how it could be played. Some ideas stayed in the back of my mind since then, for instance a fascination for the parser which seemed like magic to me at the time!

My family then bought a 286 PC and I started to play graphic adventures. I discovered The Secret of Monkey Island which became my favourite computer game and still is today. The beautiful graphics and the amazing music along with its captivating story and the friendliness of the game design are partly why I absolutely adore it still today.

In 2011, I once again came across one of those old magazines and decided to translate into Java a BASIC type-in text adventure for the ZX Spectrum 48K called The Lunnuh’s

Pyramid

What made you want to write an adventure of your own?

When I got in touch with Aristide, I found he published a follow-up to The Lunnuh’s Pyramid thirty years after the original game. I studied it and quickly realised that I wanted to invent a world and a story of my own. I also figured that many people were still interested in such games in the retro community. Hibernated 1, by Stefan Vogt, caught my attention and I bought it immediately when poly.play published it. I really loved the fact that after many years I could have a beautiful box with a wonderful picture in my hands, it was so evocative and of course, I really liked the game too.

How did you come up with the ‘lead’ character Emilia Vittorini? What were the inspirations and influences that led to the creation of the world that she inhabits?

Everything started from a discussion with my partner Annaick. She has a history degree, enjoys reading and keeps a blog where she regularly writes about history and fantasy books. She showed me that places such as Paris and London appear very often in steampunk literature. However, it is not the case for an Italian city like Turin, where I studied for a period of my life and that has a long history of industrial activities. I like classic cars and I knew that at the beginning of the 20th century there were many car makers there, so it was easy to build something around this. Steam cars were an obvious choice given the steampunk vibe I wanted to have.

Coming to Emilia, I wanted to feature a strong female character able to be at ease in such a universe. For Two Days to the Race,

I thought it would have been interesting to make her very skilled in driving cars however I quickly realised that the race itself would not have been very interesting in a text adventure, so the game deals with the story of a racing car that is stolen and must be found. That shaped the character of Emilia, who became a sort of investigator: intelligent, brave and a little unprejudiced.

For The Queen’s Footsteps, I wanted to explore an adventure possibly involving Egypt and the discoveries of Ernesto

Schiaparelli, the then director of the Egyptian Museum in Turin.

With Silk Dust I wanted once again to have cars at the centre of the plot, and I briefed myself on the Peking to Paris race of 1907 which served as an inspiration for some characters such as Princess Lucilla Briccorosso. I also wanted to develop some aspects of Emilia’s personality that I could not explore in my previous games. In the

fiction, the rally takes place between Cairo in Egypt and Peking and is meant to follow part of the Silk Road. Once again, the main plot of the game turns around the preparation of the journey and not the rally itself.

Can you give us an insight into how you came up with the main plot of the storyline for your games — being a trilogy did you already have an idea what Silk Dust would be about?

My partner once explained to me that there are two types of writers. There is the architect, who has to plan everything before starting to write the piece. Then there is the gardener, who has only a vague idea of the goal to achieve and lets the story grow by itself in the process of writing. I tend to be more a gardener than an architect. When I tried to write Two Days to the Race, I was not completely sure of what I could obtain, so writing was quite a bit exploratory. I had a main idea of the plot, but then tried many things to see how I could combine different elements. This was particularly true for the puzzles. I do not like cumbersome puzzles that would appear too artificial. I found that the best for me is writing many details of the story, then see how I can combine them together to create a situation the player has to solve. I do hope I succeeded on this, but at least I tried the best I could.

Working with a world that is relatively complex and rich in historical facts it was easy to create links between the games and even some characters for instance appear several times. Other places contain hints or citations. For instance, in the second part of Two Days to the Race, I even included a reference to The Lunnuh’s Pyramid.

Finally, it was not something planned by the start, but all three games ended up

having a similar structure. When I realised this, I thought it was a good thing providing a degree of coherence to the whole.

Am I right in saying Silk Dust is your biggest adventure yet?

Yes, that is correct. My original goal for Two Days to the Race was to write a game that could be contained in the memory of the

C64. For The Queen’s Footsteps, I thought I could split the game into three parts which would free up some kilobytes that I could use for the game. On Silk Dust, my goal was to completely fill the memory of machines with 32KB for each part.

On computers such as the ZX Spectrum 48K, there was some memory remaining for nice things such as the 64 columns with the compressed character set.

The awesome z88dk compiler offers this with minimal effort.

Was writing the game in English, not your native language, a challenge?

Definitely yes! The main goal of my games is to tell a story. This does not work if the language is incorrect, or the sentences poorly put together. My everyday language is French, but I use English regularly for my work. Writing three games in English has been an effort that I did during my spare time. Producing a literary content was something definitely ambitious for me and it certainly helped me to improve my writing skills and I learnt many things in the process, but I still need help proofreading by native speakers.

Are you the sole developer or do you have others that help you?

Yes, pretty much. However, many people have provided tremendous feedback, helped proofreading and have given great encouragement. Without them, I would have stopped myself after Two Days to the Race. I’ve also had substantial help in converting images and porting the game onto several different platforms.

Which tools / editors did you use to write the games? Did you have to learn these, or had you already had some experience using them?

I wrote all my games more or less from scratch. Discussing with Aristide Torrelli, I learnt he wrote an authoring tool called AWS (Adventure Writing System), which was inspired by the classic Graphic Adventure

Creator. I did not directly use Aristide’s tools but instead learnt how to directly write the AWS code by hand with a generic text editor. I then wrote a tool called AWS2C that takes the AWS source and generates C code that can be compiled by any decent compiler or cross-compiler.

All building and packaging are done with scripts, so I can rebuild a game for any platform by typing a single command. I tested the logic of the games by compiling them on a modern Bash terminal. To check

things, I could copy/paste there from a walkthrough. In a matter of seconds, I could be everywhere. Every time I changed something, I checked that the game could be finished with just a few keystrokes.

How long did it take you to develop the games?

I spent about 6-7 months devoting the totality of my spare time to The Queen’s Footsteps and so far, development has taken more or less the same time for Silk Dust which is in advanced beta status as we speak. Two Days to the Race took a little less time.

What was the idea behind releasing the games for so many different systems?

I like the variety of systems and I wanted to provide something for all of them. For example, there were not a lot of complex text adventure games available for the VIC20 when I started working. I also wanted to target the RC2014 that I built myself and the Olivetti M20, an obscure Italian computer that tried to compete with the IBM PC. The C64 was an obvious choice and so was the ZX Spectrum.

The portability of the C language made all this possible. Writing AWS2C, I had this in mind from the beginning.

Were there any challenges developing the game for the ZX Spectrum?

Not particularly. The z88dk compiler worked a charm and the support for ANSI control codes and the 64 columns were useful too.

How have the games been received within the Spectrum adventure community?

In general, they have been appreciated by the Spectrum community. Discovering that The Queen’s Footsteps was awarded a CRASH SMASH in the Crash Annual literally blew my mind. If someone had told this to my 12-years old self, I would not have believed it. It also got the GOTY 2020 award as the ‘Best Text Adventure’ by Planeta Sinclair and this made me incredibly happy.

The Queen’s Footsteps featured a physical release through poly.play. Will

Dust be receiving the same treatment?

For the moment, we are not planning it, but who knows?

What advice would you give other

Silk

developers looking to create their own text adventures?

I would say to write and experiment a lot. It is not advisable to try and write such games from scratch, unless you are interested in the technical side. Nowadays, there are excellent authoring tools available such as Adventuron and PunyInform which work well and are user friendly.

A second important point is the story. I personally appreciate originality. Exploring dungeons to collect treasures and kill dragons leaves me cold now. But this does not mean that a certain degree of the originality cannot be found in a similar context. Why not tell the story from the standpoint of the dragon, which is bound to defend a treasure by an ancient spell but yearns to be elsewhere, in search for love, maybe?

Mood is also important. For example, the subtitle “This place is death” was enough for me to be intrigued about Hibernated 1.

Then, comes the puzzles and other aspects of the game design. Worth reading is ‘Why Adventure Games Suck’ by Ron Gilbert, the ‘father’ of Monkey Island. He gives great advice on how to write such a game. Likewise, there is a lot of other literature worth reading that discusses the balance between the story and the puzzles. I personally think that puzzles should fit the story and not vice versa. This is why I need to have a very clear idea of the settings to decide all the details of a puzzle.

A puzzle is a careful balance between the frustration that appears when the gamer realizes that a certain mechanic has to be unlocked and the sheer pleasure to understand how to do it. Frustration must never overcome the pleasure, of course. When I play a game, I am not ashamed to use a walkthrough if I cannot solve a puzzle, especially if the puzzle turns out to be a poor or illogical one.

Finally, it is important that your game is tested and checked carefully before its final

release.

Do you have any more plans for any future text adventure titles?

To tell the truth, in this moment I need a vacation from computers. The last few months have been very stressful for everybody because of the pandemic, and I’ve had to work a lot from home. Once Silk Dust reaches V1.0, I will probably devote my spare time to things away from the screen for a while.

Is this the last we’ll see of Emilia?

Probably not. I really like her, and her world and I think I will try to write a new adventure one day in the future.

Where can people find out more about you and your games?

My blog http://davbucci.chez-alice.fr where my games are free to download. You can also find me on Itch.io: https://darwinne.itch. and Twitter: @davbucci

Thanks for your time, Davide!