Talespin
_Talespin_ is an adventure game creation system made by Mark Heaton and his
family (wife and their five children), which allows you to create interactive
graphic- and text-oriented adventure games, demos, books, tutorials, or
whatever application you can think of. It offers graphics, 100 development
commands, mouse control, no copy protection, hard drive support, and
_Telltale_ , a run-only module that allows users without _Talespin_ to see
your work.
_Talespin_ also includes two sample adventure games: _The Grail_ made by
19-year-old Rudyard Heaton and _The Wolf_ made by another artist
The design idea that drives _Talespin_ is a “page” built from drawings, text,
and sound. Conditions and variables control the text, graphic, and
action/solution possibilities, and all pages are linked to form a complete
story sequence. The Chain To Title At Page option lets you connect one story
to another, linking new or continuing tales across more than one disk.
The paint/drawing program offers Pencil, Spray, Mini-Spray, Block, Blob, Line,
and Fill functions. The Lens option allows magnification of a screen area for
detailed work; Undo removes the most recent drawing action. Although
_Talesplin_ can handle 512 colors, the ST can display only 16 at a time (due
to a hardware limitation); therefore, all drawings on a page must use the same
palette. Pictures can be copied from other stories as well as sounds.
Variables let you control the flow of text entries and drawings. Variables
must be defined (CONVERSATION, for example), set to a level, and given
conditions that will determine further text actions or movement to different
pages. The proper setting of variables, their values, and their conditions
provides for more than one action or solution for a given puzzle or problem.
All the menu selections are controlled with the mouse: the pointer highlights,
the left button selects. Clicking the right button brings up the dvelopment
menu. The only oddity about _Talespin_ concerns text. Clicking a character’s
head brings up a bubble, within which will appear the currently available
choices. The mouse pointer is used to highlight either question; the left
button selects it; the program will then take the appropriate action.