The Making of "Der Schatz im Schloss"

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The Making of Der Schatz im Schloss

Here you can, first-hand, learn of all secret ingredients for such a game! :-)

The Creators

	Daniel Schwinn "Düsi" Programing and concept
	Tobias Schwinn "Tobi" Creation of graphics

The Planning

Even for this kind of computer game there has to be a concept first. This consists of a main concept, in which there are things like, e.g., that the screen arrangement will always be the same and what the measurements of the single sections will be, decided. Additionally to this, there is a kind of script in which every screen in the game is decided upon. Here it is also determined what must be visible on an image and which objects the player can take with him/her.

There's also a program flow plan which defines how the single scenes are connected to each other. For "Der Schatz im Schloss" this program flow plan is six pages long. Every page features the concept of a strand which is bound to the particular content of the inventory. In the plan the single screens are colored according to function. For example, those screens in which the game ends are red. The yellow screens contain a crossing to the other strands and therefore build the connections to the other five plans.

The complete program flow plans in full resolution can be viewed or downloaded as pdf files (right mouse click and "save target as" to download):
Please note that these original plans are in German language.
Plan page 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5

The Graphic Art

Even the simple graphics for this game contain much work already. To guarantee fast loading even for dial up access with 9600 baud all unnecessary details were left out in the images.

At first the images are drawn on paper with Indian ink. These are now scanned in and further processed on the computer. In a first step there are hand corrections made of the details in the image. This is followed by the coloration of the images.

As a draft for the images the designer has the appropriate description of the image and the notes in the script. It also has to be taken into concern that the images fit together among each other. Everything else is left to fantasy.

The Programing

For the creation of the program a special technique has been used: With a program generator that was written in Borland Delphi the HTML files are generated for the game. There's a lot of work saved during the creation of the program files through this.

Here you can see an outtake of the Delphi program with which the files for the first image have been created:

SetText(['You are standing in the Courtyard of the Castle. Straight ahead ',
         'is the door to the Grand Entrance Hall. ',
         'To the right side is another door which you think leads to the ',
         'Servants Quarters.']);
SetLink(['Go to the Grand Entrance Hall',
         'Go Through the Door on the Right']);
SetTit('Schlosshof');
AdvPage('H1002','A002',['H1003','H1004'],[1,2],'I000');
AdvPage('H2002','A002',['H2003','H2004'],[1,2],'I001');
AdvPage('H3002','A002',['H3003','H3004'],[1,2],'I002');
AdvPage('H4002','A002',['H4003','H4004'],[1,2],'I003');

This screen is used in four strands. By calling the subroutine AdvPage four times all four pages are created.

With the previously decided specifications (text, name of the links and the titles) this subroutine AdvPage creates the whole HTML page with the use of the specified parameters (file name, image name, target addresses of the links, image name for the inventory).

For this, more subroutines are then called, like, e.g., the subroutine to output a title line.

procedure HtmlPageGen.Titel(size:integer;Center:boolean;txt:string);
var
  s:string;
begin
  s:='';
  if Center then s:=s+'<center>';
  s:=s+'<H'+IntToStr(size)+'>';
  s:=s+HtmlText(txt);
  s:=s+'</H'+IntToStr(size)+'>';
  if Center then s:=s+'</center>';
  writeln(z,s);
end;

Here is one of the files that is generated by the program outtake above:

<!-- Created by duesi computer software 1995, All rights reserved -->
<html>
<head><title>Schlosshof</title></head>
<body>
<center><img src="A002.GIF" height=200 width=300></center>
<p>You are standing in the Courtyard of the Castle. Straight ahead is 
the door to the Grand Entrance Hall. 
To the right side is another door which you think leads to 
the Servants Quarters.</p>
<UL>
<LI><a href="H1003.HTM">Go to the Grand Entrance Hall</a>
<LI><a href="H1004.HTM">Go Through the Door on the Right</a>
</UL>
<center><img src="I000.GIF" height=142 width=300></center>
</body>
</html>

The whole game flow is created by the hyperlinks among the single pages to each other. All in all "Der Schatz im Schloss" contains 83 of these HTML documents and several hundred links between the files. There are also 39 graphic files in gif format. The whole game needs about 300 KB disc space on the web server.

Now we've revealed enough of our little secrets... You shouldn't tell your competitors everything. :-)