> I wish you could tell us how to make our own adventure games on the net. Wouldn't help me much, since I'm not very good at HTML.

I was wondering if anyone would be interested in writing their own AGL games, but I don't really know of any way to allow anyone other than myself import the code so it can be tested. If there is interest, I'll consider developing a system where this would be permitted, but there's all sorts of security holes that would be opened if I allowed just anyone to upload files to my web server.

Let me backtrack. You don't need to know HTML to write a game for AGL. Instead, you need to learn a different language that I invented, which the AGL engine will read in and act upon. It's not a hard language to learn, by any means, but it is NOT user friendly; there's not really any error checking, so if you do something wrong, you don't get error messages, you get unpredictable behavior. (The reason is that error checking takes time, and the AGL engine was designed to be as fast as possible for the user.) I have a sample file written in the language with more or less complete instructions about what you need to be concerned about when writing it. I can make that file available easily enough, but as I say, the hard part would be getting what you write onto my server so it could be tested out.

I would be *fascinated* to see what other people come up with using the AGL engine. But I can't justify the manual time I would have to put into uploading code from readers for testing (it's a cycle -- you write code, then upload it, then test it, then fix the code, then upload it again) unless I could be convinced that whoever was writing it is determined enough, creative enough, and most important dedicated enough to see the project through to the end -- to a finished product that I would be able to post on the AGL web page permanently for people to play. Otherwise, as much as I'd like to see what other people would be able to create, it's not a good investment of my time.

So, GreenJeanz, Stephen, and whoever else -- does this sound like something you'd be interested in doing? If you're interested in considering writing an adventure game for inclusion on the AGL web page, do you want to know more? I can make the specs for the language available, and you can play with it as much as you like (and ask as many questions as you like). If it looks like something you *seriously* might want to do, I'll upload some small test code (that you write) to try out and help you get started. Anything you do *beyond* that that would require my involvement, I'll need a committment for. But if you commit to finishing a game, I'll commit to helping you out with the technical steps and debugging help and that sort of thing. Sadly, this wouldn't be something I could pay anybody for, but it would at least get your name on something.

So I guess those are the ground rules for this, which I've pretty much made up on the spot. Let me know if anyone out there would be interested in exploring this, and I'll make the specs available.