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| Author | The World Builder thread (grab a coffee / tea first :-) ) (Read 4876 times) | ||||||||||
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Bolkonskij
Administrator 1024 MB  Posts: 2023 
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on: March 26, 2023, 14:37
Yes, not a creative thread name, I know. But it's sunday. That's usually the day to unwind and I tend to be less creative and more in the mood for a game. :-) I thought it'd be a good time to put the spotlight on a creator software that I like: World Builder. What is it? For those of you who don't know, World Builder is an adventure creator software written by Bill Appleton in 1985. To the best of my knowledge, it was the first such software on the Mac and specifically intended to let the average user create a game without worrying about a compiler and programming in C / Pascal. Unimportant fun fact: The first ever adventure created by it ("Enchanted Scepters") even got a commercial release in 1985 and is now a highly sought after collectible. During the 1990's Ray Dunakin, who wrote some of the best World Builder adventures, took on patching the application to 32-bit mode and generally promoting the software for several years when official support was long gone. In fact, publisher Silicon Beach software had been long gone too! World Builder suffered from the "Hypercard-syndrome": Software that is easy to use and widely available leading to a lot of mediocre software getting published and subsequently ruining the reputation of the tool. ("World Builder games? They can't be good!"). This perception is, however, wrong. Personal memories I may be viewing World Builder through rosy glasses since I grew up with the software and its games. They ran perfectly fine on our family LC and at a time when new games were really expensive, the free World Builder games were a great alternative for the young me. I remember playing (in hindsight) badly designed Star Trek and college dorm fan games. How do they say? When we grew up, we had nothing ... I always wanted to create a sophisticated adventure game myself using World Builder. But I never managed. Well, apart from some juvenile humour game I made for my best buddy in which he was hunted through our school by a particular nasty teacher we had. I assume, 90% of World Builder games had that personal nature and were never publicly released :-) Is it any good? World Builder uses an easy-to-understand scripting language. It's a lot like spoken English in a sense like "If user clicks on door, change door graphics" and serves as a good entry to the topic for non-programmers I think. Naturally, being a Mac game it also works with a lot of drag & drop and dialog windows, so nothing that should hold people back. I have to admit that as a game editor, it's as mediocre as many of its games. There's too few options and most games look much alike with little room for customization - but then that also added to the flair of its games, as you knew where everything is and how it works. And the simplicity kept projects small & easy - good for weekend warriors to manage and in its own way a plus and a minus I guess. The beauty of it really is the simplicity, the 1-bit black & white graphics (I just love them!) and the huge compatibility. If you add in the unofficial patched versions, World Builder games run on nearly all Mac OS versions down to the aforementioned 1985 Mac 512k with some odd System/Finder combo. And finally, it has games with very creative settings / ideas that would never made it into commercial mass-market products. Be it politically incorrect humour or very odd settings. And I like the creativeness of it. Some of my favorites! The Macintosh Garden has a great selection of many great (and many not so great) World Builder games. Of them, I'd like to pick three of my favorites in case you want to try a World Builder game but don't know which to pick: The Adventures of Steve Reeve (1993) You play a bumbling spy on the trail of a deadly assassin. Love the good humour. It's a bit short and it's not difficult, so might be a good starter. The author is still around on the Mac Garden (jkheiser), as is the game. Exploration Zeta (1996) This is a nice Sci-Fi themed adventure by Spencer King in which you explore an abandoned spacestation. What happened here? Kinda reminded me of the cheesy 70's Sci-Fi stuff that I used to inhale as a kid / teen. So I just had to upload it to the Mac Garden. The Canal District (2001) I think it came out years earlier but I only found traces of the 2001 final release. Louise Hope is a talented adventure designer, I like the way she tells her stories. I think she was "a mom with a Mac" and started creating adventures with her kid(s) as a fun thing to do together and later got struck with the "creator's virus". I've picked this one from her just because I haven't been able to play through her other adventures yet. But I dare say it's safe to really recommend all her games. It's also on the Garden. And so is the World Builder software. On to my questions :-) Have you any experience with World Builder and/or its games? Any favorite games? Any personal memories you'd like to share? |
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Last Edit: March 26, 2023, 14:56 by Bolkonskij
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cballero
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1024 MB  Posts: 1179 System 7, today and forever
Reply #1 on: March 26, 2023, 21:33
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I wish I could say that I do, just reading you're write-up it sounds like fun! Now I can say that I did play some fun VIC-20 interactive purely text-based story games that you had to choose action which would then have different consequences and final outcomes, which was a lot of fun, even if all of it had no graphics and was all about only reading the prompts you got.. it was exciting to try to get the outcome that ended-up being the most successful! Boy, those were the days!!  I mention my early TV-based computer cartridge games because they sound just a little like the World Builder game platform! 
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Bolkonskij
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Administrator 1024 MB Posts: 2023
Reply #2 on: March 27, 2023, 13:27
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haha, I figured this thread will likely not get too many answers (for now). In fact, World Builder really is a mix between later graphical adventures and parser-style text adventures. You can create a game entirely based on mouse-clicks - or one that makes heavy use of a parser. Many games mixed both. It's just very fun stuff to enjoy on a 68k Macintosh, has this "original Macintosh days" feeling to it :-)
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