WANTED! Beta-testers for Larry Horsfield’s new PAWED (well, err, ACEd) text adventures

Our much-admired Master of the Guild of PAW Writers, HE Larry Horsfield, the creative talent behind those & many acclaimed PAWed text adventures published as FSF Adventures – The AXE OF KOLT saga or the MAGNETIC MOON saga among many others – back in the eighties and a regular reported star in the magazines of the age - Sinclair User or Your sinclair, to mention just a couple -, has kept on working on his PAW creations over the years and is now, in 2011, ready to release respectively a brand-new adventure, Fortress of Fear, plus an updated version of The lost children, both authored using the PAW language and compiled using the ACE Adventures package (available for download at the software tab of the Reservoir), a 100% compatible tool with the original PAW language but with much extended capabilites in line with the requirements of the modern times.

Larry is looking for beta-testers so as to fine-tune both adventures to perfect release candidates in the very next months to come. So if you like IF and text-adventures and would like to have the privilege of collaborating with him for the release of these two long-expected & excellent pieces of text adventuring to the world, please write Larry at lazzah2000@yahoo.co.uk.

Happy adventuring!!

WANTED! … and obtained!

Despite the void that seems to have engulfed this reservoir for the last months, we have endured the hard work at the backstage to keep the PAW alive.

As yet, we have not been able to get hold of the SWAN nor the DAAD, but, thanks to the contribution of Dave Webb, you can now find the Opus discovery A080 version of the PAW at the software tab of the reservoir. Dave advises that the image contains the abandoned database of an unfinished adventure of his and, although he has been unable to delete it from the file, he has still decided to contribute it to the reservoir.

We thank Dave for approaching the reservoir with such a contributive attitude and invite him get further involved in whichever way he may feel like.

Do you want to contribute your own suggestions here? Please don’t hesitate to do it and WRITE NOW to paw@artematopeya.es.

The 10 commandments of adventure writing for small-screened devices

1. Favour inverse-video (light ink upon dark background) rather than true-video when writing text games for small-screened devices (SSDs). Sights worldwide will be thankful and more eager to invite their hosting eyeballs to play it.
2. A full-sized screen design squeezed in a small screen (100%>50%) is more uncomfortable than a small-sized screen design designed to fit in a small-sized screen (100%>100%). Design the interface of your game with the end-user screen size in mind. The fact that emulators can emulate all those nice features does not mean that you must, ought, need to use all of them.
3. Colour is nice but makes reading confusing in SSDs. Stick to black background and white font ink. A touch of colour here and there is fine, but that’s it for now.
4. Fonts are also nice but most of them are a pest to read. Stick to standard, square, bold types that print clearly on screen.
5. In the end: never combine exotic fonts with colours.
6. Make sure and test that all of your interface’s elements can be read effortlessly in the end-user device. Believe me: most times, it turns out that the appearance of your text adventure in the e.g. Nokia N95 looks as garbled as a nice porridge of scrambled eggs. Who feels like playing a game like that?
7. Most emulators accept regular text input either via an emulated, transparent keyboard or an “input string” native menu option. But things like function keys (F1), extra modes, etc., are usually poorly implemented and can make of your game a headache to play. Avoid intricate inputs and stick your player’s input to numbers 0-9 and letters a-z.
8. Keep your input as simple as possible: one- or two-touch commands is rule of thumb here. Map your vocabulary in advance and make sure that most, if not all, of the necessary commands feature a one- or two-letter synonim: EX for examine, TK for take, TAL for take all, DR for drop, etc.
9. Learn from the masters and keep your vocabulary (verbs) as synthetic as possible.  Put them in an online screen and let the player have a refresh reading with a HELP command. Shortlist  your verbs (as Lucasarts games do) and create a core group of commands that can apply to most of the situations. Remember that the pleasure and beauty of playing IF and text adventures is the reading effect of events happening rather than finding the right word or emulating Shakespeare and prove that you can produce the most complicate phrasing.
10. Put as much passion and work on a text adventure for SSDs as you may on a large, PC desktop text adventure. A small screen does not mean small descriptions, small puzzles (if that’s your adventure writing style), small attention to details, small mistakes here and there… small meaning bad, ugly, stupid, incomplete or simply unprofessional. When writing text adventures for SDDS, think bigger than big.

Do you want to contribute your own suggestions here? Please don’t hesitate to do it and WRITE NOW to paw@artematopeya.es.

Hi there…

Welcome, Philip Richmond

The Thin Basic Adventure Builder (a.k.a. TAB) is the creation of Philip Richmond. To make a long story short, TAB is a modern PAW replicant written in thin-Basic. If you download the latest version, you will feel at home with TAB as it also speaks PAW. A particular dialect, but PAW nonetheless.

You can report to http://tab.thinbasic.com/ for full information about TAB and to download the latest version available.

If you feel like watching TAB in motion, you can also visit Philip’s Youtube channel at http://www.youtube.com/user/catventure.

We sincerely thank Philip for his nice & friendly approach to this reservoir. We will keep you all posted about the evolution of TAB, the release of new versions and whichever info Philip may provide and contribute to the PAW culture through this reservoir site.

FEATURE! The PAW Programming Bible

The How to… section of The PAW Reservoir is intended to contain the intel about the software: manuals, tutorials, code snippets and routines, source codes, programming aids, how-to articles…

At this very early stage of the reservoir, we are mainly focused on getting hold of contents and stuff rather than making them look neat & nice. That’s why the Programming Bible, our own particular first-folio of the PAW culture, contains scanned documents, merely attached one to another and as yet is not organized at all. Every single piece of new PAW intel we may come across will be added to the file in due course.

One of the things we’re after is Cristopher Hester’s Adventure Code pages, one of the most reputed fanzines of the time. But we seem to be unable to get hold of Chris, of his editor (Mandy Rodrigues) or of anyone who may have these valuables in store. 

Does anybody know how to get in touch with either of them nowadays?

All contributions in this respect are much more than welcome.

The PAW Monster Edition

The PAW Monster Edition is a project of The PAW Reservoir for the development of a PAW replicant.

Another PAW replicant?!?!

The PAWME will replicate the original PAW design (database and language interpreter embedded within an editor) on the PC. The application will be self-contained and compact (no external libraries, no multiple executables, no file renaming, no compiler-interpreter architecture anymore… ). An .exe file will launch an editor that will provide the functions of the original PAW…

But why do we need another PAW system for Windows? We already have Doug Harter’s WinPAW, among others…

… hmm, that will provide the functions of the original PAW plus all many of the advanced features of the existing clones. This reset intends to upgrade the PAW design to the modern times and, while retaining all of the look & feel of the original software, make of it a serious tool able to produce top level games as many of those produced with the big ones. No object-oriented programming, no simulation paranoia, no endless lists of unaffordable plug-ins…

• indexed database-driven system like the PAW but with extended capabilities: up to 65.000 locations, objects, dictionary, processes, flags, messages… (eventually unlimited).
• expanded database structure with new data fields.
• programmable PROCESS 0 (zero).
• new PROCESS * (simultaneous to player’s input).
• up to 20 user-defined windows for screen layout.
• up to 65.000 flags (variables).
• up to 100 local flags for locations and objects.
• automatized behaviours via location and object flags: define attributes (container, non-player character, visited, foe, liquid, opaque… whatever) once and the system handles accordingly.
• location routes.
• stacks for FIFO operations with flags.
• buffers for text ‘maths’.
• flag indexation.
• location routes.
• authomatic & customizable light, hour and weather systems.
• distant objects reporting and ‘atmospheric’ messaging for dynamic description effects.
• simple macro programming
• expanded PAW grammar: WINDOWx, WHATL(loc), WHATP (process), BITWISE condacts, OOPS and AGAIN, NPC interaction condacts, a power-boosted DOALL…
• hard wired ’start’ database with real and advanced functionality.
• Hopefully, multiple target compilation: PC, DS, Java, Windows CE, etc.

… all interfaced via a user-friendly and simple editor similar to that of the original PAW. Plus some other nice and useful embellishments.

So, what are we supposed to be able to write with the PAWME?

Regardless of their beauty and retro-feeling, the 8-bit based windows versions of PAW are unfortunately too limited and cannot be used for large and text-plenty games or interactive fictions. To put it simply: they do not accommodate enough text nor database resources. SINTAC (which is, in fact, not a replicant of the PAW but of its elder brother DAAD) or CAECHO do in fact have most of the functions and the required expanded grammars that could in fact produce large and meaty text adventures. But SINTAC (absolutely beautiful) insists on the 8-bit limit of 256 of each class except for messages. There’s no use in having 65.000 messages if you can only use 256 flags to control such a monster, 256 objects and rooms with no local flags or attributes, if there’s not any bitwise operation grammar, etc. And the CAECHO system is a prodigy of design (the database is, simply, superb and massively fillable with so many values and flags and text maths and the language is so varied and so proficient…) but the paw-like grammar has been translated into a strange C-like spanish dialect. A beautiful software design by a computing engineer for computer engineeers. Mortals cannot simply make any sense of it, let aside write a game with it. And both of them only run under MS-DOS plus their authors have turned their back on the PAW forever and reject to update and recompile these fantastic tools to run under Windows. Sic.

We are starting to evaluate Superglús and ACE as both are superb PAW replicants. But we still feel that a rewrite, a new design and an editor version would be much better. Among the reviewed programming packages for our rewrite, Multimedia Fusion has taken the pole position for the time being…

You can report to the Project tab at for further information about the PAWME.

Thank you, Jacob Gunness…

… and a NOTICE.

Jacob Gunness is the head and master of the Classic Adventures Solution Archive (a.k.a. CASA), a well-known site among text adventurers throughout the world since 1999 that, in his own words, “attempts to be the most comprehensive resource for solutions for classic text adventures, covering everything from Spectrum, Commodore 64 and Apple II to BBC, TRS-80, Amstrad, Dragon or Amiga“. CASA currently contains 1223 solutions, 195 maps and 359 games with hints plus interviews, news and whatever else may be related to 8-bit text adventures (mainly written with database-driven parsers such as The Quill, The PAW or The GAC, among others) and, since recently, also the side-genre of interactive fiction (namely INFORM or TADS).

Out of his own experience and expertise, Jacob has recently reviewed The PAW Reservoir and has provided me with an extremely sensible and juicy list of comments and suggestions about this site. I intend to adopt and faithfully implement all of his ideas as they will help make of The PAW Reservoir a much better and more user-friendly site. A few have already been arranged; the remainder will follow soon, as time permits.

The aforementiones notice is:

Being as yet a one-man undertake only, The PAW Reservoir is intended to advance at a reasonable pace, meaning that the site will be updated and new contents will be uploaded as often as possible but not daily. This (current) first incarnation of the site was built and filled with an advance of contents in some six days. I am still devoted to an intensive compilation work, as the existing information about the PAW is disseminated, hidden, unavailable, lost or forgotten. But I am also re-writing and editing texts, searching and finding PAW-related people, compiling (collecting parts) and packaging files to upload here, seeking contributors, writing The PAW Monster Edition working guidelines and programming specifications, drawing graphics and writing for the forthcoming Spacerogues #1 game… Once the start-up phase of the site is completed, then the time will come for embellishments and a faster-paced life… %-}

If you are a text adventurer, writer or player, then you can’t but pay Jacob a a visit at his CASA!!!

Thanks much, Jacob, for contributing your brains. And be Welcome to The PAW Reservoir.

Welcome, Garry Capuccini

20 years after, Garry Capuccini has returned.

Garry was, back in the 1990, heartfully praised by Mike Gerrard on his Your Sinclair section as one of the most innovative PAW programmers (read review here) of the time. His talent for designing neat and superb graphic layouts, rare in the text adventuring lair, along with the refined programming skills shown in his Crack City debut, earned him a solid reputation as a PAW celebrity.

I am looking forward to hearing what’s been up with Garry as to text adventuring and PAWing for the last 20 years. It will be reported in due course. Here, at the Reservoir.

Welcome, Larry Horsfield

¡Larry Horsfield is back!

Well, in fact he never quit. Larry is a PAW celebrity of the Golden Age of PAW (1985-1990+). Under the trademark of FSF Adventures, he manufactured PAW masterpieces like The axe of Kolt and Magnetic moon series, The Krazy Kartoonist Kaper and many other excellent games. FSF games were well known for being extra-fun and extremely well written and designed, pushing both the computer and the PAW software to the limits to allocate his detailed stories and many advanced programming features, always with a friendly style and a proven intelligent game planning, as attested, for instance, by things like his guide to playing and writing adventure games, published once by Your Sinclair. His games were mostly for the giant 128k machines but rarely included graphics. It all went to text, multiple-part games, fantastic routines and in-game facilities, characters, etc.

If you want to learn from a master how to programme a text adventure using the PAW language, unpaw (using the Unpaw package available at the Manuals et al. page) any of his games and have it printed for a thorough pencil and marker work.

I recently received an email from Larry in which he confimed that he is currently working on the PC version of Fortress of fear, a previously unreleased text adventure he had left unfinished back in the 90′s on the ZX Spectrum. He is no longer using the official and original PAW software but Win ACE, one of the most interesting fourth generation PAW replicants (rather ”evolutions”) produced by a friend of his, Andy Clark, and available for download at the Software page of the Reservoir. Apparently, Larry has been busy with some other undertakes since the PAW times but he reports that it is still his intention to convert all of his adventure games to the PC using Win ACE. Good news, innit?

¡Welcome back, Larry!

Spacerogues #1: Design

WANTED! Infinite Imaginations’ SWAN and Tim Gilberts’ DAAD

Once the PAW had become the market standard benchmark for text adventuring all around the world (meaning in the UK, which in fact was meant the world as to text-adventuring),  Yeandle and Gilberts joined Hugh Hamer-Powell to create Infinite Imaginations and develop the next generation parser. It was known by the name of System without a name (SWAN) and put to good use by Fergus McNeill for his Mindfighter game. Along all the bells and whistles already available in PAW, the new system allowed for the use of digitised graphics instead of a line editor, an even more advanced English parser, advanced intelligent interactive characters, an alternative icon-driven system control and many, many, many other beautifulities.

Time later, Tim Gilberts was hired by the spanish company Aventuras AD to create a tailor-made, all new in-house parser featuring PAW’s and SWAN’s tools plus new enhancements suggested by Andrés Samudio. The Diseñador de Aventuras AD (DAAD) reached version 2.6 and only a few may be aware of the secret location of the vault where the DAAD backup files are kept today.

These systems belong inasmuch to the PAW culture. They have been kept hidden for years and it IS definitely hard to get hold of them by any means.

If you are Andrés Samudio or any other living identity, have a copy of the DAAD and want to contribute your treasures with the PAW culture and the worldwide PAW community, you are invited to do so. The same applies if you want to be credited for sharing your copy of the SWAN system. Any versions, any systems. Both packages, when provided, will be made available at the PAW Zero page of this site.

Thank you in advance for your generosity.

Spacerogues #1: Design

Spacerogues #1: Design

My pulpish, forthcoming space opera Spacerogues #1 – Flowers for the singer features Agent Arem Eaglestorm plus four sidekick interactive characters plus several supportting characters (with a limited interactivity, though). Character design and location graphics are fully underway now. For your records, this pixelized babe isn’t but Stella, the jazz singer of the title that is forced to remain captive in the dark & smoky red-district club known as The Black Nest. More 24×24 sprite-art panels to follow soon.

DOWNLOAD! Selected Works of Josep Coletes

The Selected works of Josep Coletes-zip contains The winds of the Walhalla Gold Edition, all the published games (8 so far) of the Dr Van Halen series, the Lucybel trilogy and the legacy Idiliar trilogy, all of which are PAWed games (ZX Spectrum format) . The works contained in this zipped file span some 20 years (1988 through 2009). Hmm.

¿Who says the PAW is outdated?

ENROL! PAW Pride Index call for registration

The Reservoir also aims at compiling an up-to-date & public census of PAW users and programmers so that initiatives like team-ups, projects and others tasks can be easily assigned and implemented. C’mon, register with the Index by sending an e-mail including:

• your full name
• nickname (if any)
• date of birth
• working language
• e-mail address
• proprietary IF/text-adventures related web sites, blogs, etc
• preferred platform: ZX, Amstrad, Windows PC, etc
• any published games, PAWed or not
• specialty: story/script writing, concept art, game design, programming, beta-testing, etc
• interest in type of project: parser design, new games, remakes (e.g. The PAWed Hobbit Deluxe), translations, alt genre PAWed games (e.g. strategy), games for portable devices (under emulation, e.g. ZX), etc
• comments whatsoever

Only full name/nickname and e-mail info will be listed in page 6: People. Enrol the PAW Community TODAY and enjoy working in projects with others for the sheer & mere sake of being creative and HAVE FUN!

WANTED! Version history

There currently exist several versions of the PAW available in the ZX Spectrum format:

• A04-c
• A09-c
• A16-c
• A16-d
• A17-c
• A18-?
• B01-c
• B02-c
• B03-+3

… plus storage-device based versions (microdrive, +3 disk, etc). As per my limited wits and documentation, I can infer that A- versions correspond to the first generation implementation. The A04-c is the most screen-dumped english version reported in articles and internet sites. Versions kept on growing serially (maintenance and bug-ridding, most probably) up to A16-c which is, I guess, the mature release that include turn-of-the-century technical advances reported in the manual supplement for A16+versions. New maintenance releases until A-18 and, ¡tzak!, the PAW is localized into spanish and a new branch of the system emerges. The first spanish release corresponds to A18 but, from then onwards, versions are serialized upon B-. Most probably, while the spaniards ketp on upgrading the PAW Tim Gilberts had it replaced by the SWAN in England which, in turn, became the semen for the all-exclusive, in-house DAAD misterious thing, again in spanish… 

Is there any chance that an eventual somebody may have any idea on which features featured each and every of the versions of the system, so that this humble heart may compile a trustworthy version history of the software.

I wonder… were there any undocumented features hidden somewhere within the PAW?

Welcome, Tony Barber

A few months ago, I wrote Tony:

Hi there,

I am testing a new software and I was wondering If I could use Valkyrie 17 for a training exercise. Will you send me copy of maps, listings and the source code? And bla bla bla.

Tony turned out to send none of what I had requested but everything and even more: he sent a full copy of his brand new The Biro 2 writing package including the working files of Valkyrie 17. The system includes a mapping feature among many other bells and whistles. Jaw-drop.

The fact is that I would have never expected to learn that The Biro wasn’t but a database-based system, conceived somewhere near 1980+something around the commonplace idea of what a writing tool should look and work like. And that was, you’re right, Gilsoft’s The Quill (see? biro, quill… hmm). More advanced, capable of handling PSIs, a similar syntax, an editor on PC!, a pseudo-graphic mapping feature, digitised graphics’ handling (in a renamed .gif to .avg format), etcétera.

In my opinion, The Biro sits right between The Quill and The PAW. I don’t have any permission from Tony to upload it to this site nor to provide any details about the system and I thus I will not. But I believe that, despite any eventual limitations of the system or formal detours from the PAW language paradigm, The Biro is a worthy PAWish system and fully deserves to be welcome in this site among his brethren.

Should Tony eventuallly grants permission to make The Biro go public through the Reservoir, the news will be reported in due course via this blog page of the site.

What the Reservoir in fact is…

… a worldwide depot & referral site for the PAW culture and a springboard to imagine, share, create and dream worlds, adventures, stories and endless fun.

Welcome to the PAW culture! Welcome to the Reservoir.

First project on the pipe: Spacerogues #1 for the ZX Spectrum (emulated)

At the time this site goes public, I will have been working for some ten days on the first project for the Reservoir. It is #1 on the Spacerogues series entitled Flowers for the singer and will solely and exclusively be programmed using the PAW and its original editors on a ZX emulator (ZXDS) running on a Nintendo DS. Quite a challenge to try and replicate that feeling of that late-at-night, dark-roomed, hunchbacked fingerfastin’ upon the  bloody rubber keyed toy.

The action is settled in Domusphera, a large technological citadel.

No game may start without a proper title screen…

… and may not unfold without a sexy interface, in this case based on Garry Capuccini’s design for Crack City. And, ¿what about the girl?

Before I start with the actual programming of the story (with locations, objects, events, etc), I am taking my time to work out a style database template for the whole series. It should accommodate an online manual using container location unused text, a graphic interface updated in realtime, a flyable airspace using coordinates, atmospheric messaging – people wandering, transport, weather, etc… and as many other features as memory permits. I will try to keep the template clean and compact to save enough space for an exciting plot and abundant and funny puzzles but it will necessarily make of it a 128k project only.

The template and database budget of the story will, obviously, be published in this site once tested so that you can use it for your own work if you want to. Source code listing of the release candidate version will be published as well.

Stay tuned.

¿Where on earth is Andrés Samudio?

Andrés once had a vision. He tried and made his hardest to create a market for text adventuring in spanish. He was passionate about text adventures. He was passionate about stories and writing games. He was passionate about computers and entertainment. He opened the homegrown adventure writing scene to the avid spanish creators of the time. He made it possible that I got hold of my very own copy of the PAW (which I still have and treasure). He pushed hard to transform his hobby into a professional endeavour that languished. He invested in a comercial project that failed. And he vanished after that.

¿Do you know where Andrés Samudio is hiding? We want to hear from him.

What the Reservoir is not…

…a place to raise disputes on which system, Inform or PAW, is better and which technology is technologically more advanced and perfect and has a wider community support or add-ons released and so on ‘n’ on ‘n’ on.. As simple as this: if you are an informite that don’t like the PAW and don’t like, neither, that others may like it, simply beware of the dog and keep away from this site. Neither you nor your brains are forced to visit here.

This informite rejection rule does not apply to José Luis Díaz, honoured by this site for his contribution (Pawsez) to the PAW culture. Other amnestied informites will be announced in due course. José Luis Cebrián and Javier San José emerge as serious candidates to the knowledge of this site…

Welcome to The PAW Reservoir

If you are visiting The PAW Reservoir for the first time, please turn to the About page to learn more about the PAW software, the PAW language and this site.

The PAW Reservoir is a site by ARTEMATOPEYA.

Site in beta phase. Comments, contributions, bug reports and suggestions are welcome at paw@artematopeya.es.