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The VENTURE system provides a complete environment for designing, building and playing point-of-view, graphic adventure games for Windows. The games produced by this system are based around the concept of rooms. A VENTURE game consists of a series of connected rooms, on many different levels. These rooms can contain doors, creatures, sounds, objects, ladders and other items that produce obstacles or puzzles for the player to overcome. VENTURE produces two types of adventure games, treasure gathering and destination. A treasure gathering game is like the original, classic Adventure game. The player has to explore the rooms, gathering all the treasures and returning them to a specific room. The game is won when all the treasures have been gathered. A destination or goal type of game is one where the player has to rescue someone or reach a certain destination. The game is won when the player gets to the destination room. During game play, the player uses the Play Screen. This screen provides the player with a view into the room in the direction he or she is facing. There are 8 possible direction views in a room, corresponding to compass directions. To play the game, the player turns around in the room to view different directions, picks up and uses objects, talks with and/or fights with creatures, opens doors, jumps over abysses and moves from room to room. In Design mode, the user designs and builds a game using the various game design components. The components include: the rooms and their layout, the objects and their attributes, the creatures and their attributes, scripts for the creatures so they can talk to the player, decor items, various level options including random creature attacks and object thefts and the game setup options. All the design components are viewed in context as they are designed. Included with VENTURE are two complete adventure games built with the VENTURE system. The first, 'The Caverns of Makalu', is a traditional treasure gathering game that takes place in underground caverns and has creatures such as dragons, wizards and orcs. The second, 'Starbase Varga', is a destination type game set in space with aliens and robots. These two games demonstrate the variety of adventures that can be built with the VENTURE system. |
