We
met a lot of well-known programmers at the PCW-show in late autumn 1986.
But one of the real highlights was a female programmer: Anita Sinclair(23)
presented the Commodore64 release of "The Pawn". Anita is part
of the "three men and one woman" programming team called Magnetic
Scrolls, developing adventure games for about three years. Together we
walked to the press centre where Anita answered a lot of our questions.
Anita.
The first question must be: How did you become a programmer? It is rather
unusual, isn't it?
That's
definitly not true. There are as many female programmers as male ones.
At least in professional sector where mainly languages like COBOL are
used 50% of the programmers are female. But I admit that game programming
is dominated by men.
You
scored 1. So, when did you start with game programming?
I've
always been interested in technical terms. So I never possesed a doll.
In contrast I took apart the car of my father once. And before anyone
starts joking: I reassembled it. Fortunately my parents recognized my
technical leanings and made an appropriate education possible.
What
were your first experiences with computers ?
A
few years ago I got an Apple 2. I just spent a short time with Basic.
I think one of the key experiences was that I managed it to display my
name on the monitor with Assembler instructions. The next step was an
animation program: My name moved along the screen. At that moment I was
sure that I will be involved with computers for a long time.
And
how did it all start with Magnetic Scrolls ?
Magnetic
Scrolls was born about three and a half years ago. That time I played
a lot of Infocom adventures. I really like them. They have really terrific
stories. I thought that, together with three colleagues, we are able to
create adventures like Infocom. And so we bought the hardware and started
programming. We had a small network of four Apple computers connected
to a hard disk ( a nearly prohibitive luxury at that time ). Today we
have a quite larger network with different systems. The tools we use like
the assembler and the compiler were created by ourself. For writting adventure
games we developed a new programming language that allows the easy creation
of parsers. As we developed all tools by ourself, there are more than
12 years of work in The Pawn. A small anecdote that shows why it was so
important for us to use our own tools for programming: When The Pawn was
near completion we started debugging. This is done by a separate program
called debugger, which works like a machine code monitor. Our debugger
continuously complained about a certain part of our program. But as much
as we inspected the code we could not find a mistake, so the only reason
was an error in the debugger itself. Because we had developed the debugger
on our own, we were fortunately able to correct the mistake. So, you can
never be sure that a program is error-free. That's the main reason why
we use tools that can be corrected by ourself.
This
sounds like the development of The Pawn was quite expensive. Three years
ago, you could not know whether you will be successfull or not. And most
probably you havn't been contracted at that time. How did you finance
the project?
First
of all we were fully behind the concept of The Pawn and our parser. We
were convinced that it would be as successfull as any of the Infocom games,
because we wanted to offer the same quality at least. And if you really
believe in your success you somehow manage to get the money. For about
18 months it was financed with my savings. But another very important
part were our mothers who supported us as much as they could. Without
their help we would not have gotten that far. Now we earn some money with
our work, so our finances are secured at the moment.
Originally
The Pawn was a pure text adventure developed for the Sinclair QL. So,
why does the Atari ST version contain graphics?
Actually
The Pawn has always been a text adventure. After we finished the ST version
we went to Rainbird for negotiating a contract. Then anyone had the really
stupid idea of turning The Pawn into a graphic adventure. I had just two
(and very forcefull) words: Forget it. From that time they were extremly
friendly and they persuaded us of taking a glance at a picture of Geoff
Quilley. The picture was brilliant. So we thought, why not give it a try
and sent two patterns of the forest and the palace gardens to Geoff. He
created the two pictures and they were that fascinating that we changed
opinion. The pictures havn't been added to The Pawn because we wanted
them, but they were that excellent that it would have simply been foollish
not to integrate them. One of our major arguments against the pictures
was the large space required. Most current graphic adventures just offer
very simple pictures that have no value for the plot and do nothing than
wasting memory. But here comes another anecdote: At the Summer-CES in
Chicago I presented The Pawn once again. Of course some people from Infocom
visited us and we had a very interesting talking, discussing the graphics
topic. In the end I could not control myself: I had a disk with pictures
from our second title - The Guild of Thieves. I loaded a picture showing
a room with all its furnitures. This picture is one of the best and most
detailed ones. I ask the Infocom guys: How many words do you need for
describing this picture? They answered: About 1500 words. Then I worked
out that we much less memory with our graphics compression than you need
for storing 1500 words in an Infocom adventure.
Can
you tell us something about The Guild of Thieves?
I
won't tell you about the story. You have to wait until spring when the
game will be released. But I'd like to tell you a little bit more about
the pictures. The Pawn has proven that pictures in adventures can be so
sophisticated that they're worth the work. So, it was clear, that The
Guild will contain pictures,too. And they're even much better than the
pictures from The Pawn. But this time they're not just embellishment,
but they serve serveral tasks in the game. For that reason we re-wrote
the game text after receiving the final pictures.
How
does your artist create his pictures? Does he use his own painting software,
or does he use a digitializer?
We're
all strictly against digitializers. The quality is absolutly bad. A painter
can do much more detailed work. With merging high-contrast colours together
you can gain a lot of effects a digitializer cannot generate. We tried
it once and surely will never use it again. I thought Geoff needs some
very good painting programs for his work, so I bought some: Degas, Deluxe
Paint, and some more. I paid more than 500£. Then I went to Geoff
and all he said was: I do not need that. I create all my pictures with...
Neochrome. First, I thought: Oh no, he's mad. Look at all these functions
Deluxe Paint offers. But he took the mouse and Neochrome and within seconds
he painted anything I wanted: circles, squares, soft colour fadings. He
really knows about the art of painting. All these functions of Deluxe
Paint are done by his right hand.
How
many people are working at Magnetic Scrolls today?
Currently
we are eight programmers including me. The new programmers are mainly
involved in porting our games to other machines. So we have a C64 expert,
a Schneider CPC expert, and an Atari-8-bit expert. For each machine we
need to implement our parsing language. We need new graphic drivers and
the pictures have to be re-painted. Except for the Amiga version, which
uses the graphics of the Atari ST version, each version has its own pictures
for getting as much as possible out of the machine. A lot of programming
tricks were needed with the C64 version, our first 8-bit release. The
processor of the 1541 floppy drive is used as co-processor for decrypting
text. And the scrolling of the pictures makes heavy use of different software
tricks. But it seems it was worth the work as our measuring showed that
our C64 parser is much faster than the Infocom parser.
One
more question concerning your current work. Some time ago you've told
that you're able to translate your adventures to any languages because
of the flexibility of your parser. So will there be a german adventure
in near future?
Some
time ago we were very optimistic on the capabilites of our system for
tanslated games. But after getting deeper into german grammar, we had
to accept that an adventure in german language is impossible with our
current parsing system. There would be even more problems with a french
adventure. But we are developing new parsers that can be adapted to different
languages. So maybe there will come a german adventure in about two years.
You're
quite open-minded to computer business. But there are surely things you
dislike. What do you disapprove in software industry?
I
am really loathe to hyping and to movie games that have nothing to do
with the actual movie. But there is another thing that is racking our
brains: the new computer systems like Atari ST or Amiga. The develpment
costs for new games on the 16-bit machines are extremely high. Games like
Marble Madness or Stargliders take huge amounts of time until completion.
So many companies do not want to cope with the high costs or do not have
the financial capabilites to do so. They port 8-bit games to 16-bit machines.
The customer gets old games that do not take advantage of the advanced
features of the system. The game does not sell very well, the company
doesn't earn enough money and so keeps on producing low-quality software.
We must escape this vicious circle. So far I actually know just three
programs that are really worth playing on an Atari ST: Starglider, Time
Bandits, and The Pawn. The rest is too simple for 16-bit systems.
Let's
talk a little bit about your future. What are the plans of Magnetic Scrolls
for the next years, what will Anita Sinclair be doing?
We
have a contract with Rainbird that commits ourself of producing six adventures
within the next two years. Anyway, Magnetic Scrolls calls itself a parser
specialist. So we're not limited to adventures. More concretly, we're
working on two programs that use a parser, but aren't adventures. Cannot
tell you more about the project, but it should cause a stir in entertainment
market. About Anita Sinclair: I do not believe that I'll still program
parsers in twenty years, but in the near future that's what I want to
do.
Many
thanks for your detailed answers.
At
last Anita told us which games she would take with her to a lost island
if she had to choose five favourites. Anyway, Anita insisted on taking
a word processor for the Macintosh with her. These are the programs:
Hack (mainframe)
Wizardry (MS-DOS)
Zork Trilogy (arbitrary system)
Castle Wolfenstein (Apple II)
Elite (BBC)
Quite a mixture...Anita would have to carry a lot of hardware
with her.