Eamon Engine

The Wonderful World of Eamon was created by Donald Brown. It came with two adventures and a text-based RPG system construction set used to create more adventures. The system allowed for graphics but the game focused heavily on text. Even though the core system has always been public domain NOT ALL THE ADVENTURES ARE; there were and still are several commercial packages that include the system and collections of games. Written in BASIC. It was ported via BASIC to Atari 8-bit, Atari 16-bit, Apple ProDOS, AppleDOS 3.3, MS-DOS, Windows and probably many other platforms. Over the years the core system continued to be updated and is still be being updated to this day, there are QBasic and Visual Basic updates. Old adventures are always being updated and new adventures are still being written.

The original game was a collection of the Main Hall adventure, Beginners Cave adventure, and the base Eamon System. Note that the Main Hall and Eamon System were virtually synonymous and contained on the "Master Disk". Players would enter the Main Hall where they could generate a character for themselves. From the Main Hall, players could travel to and return from the various adventures that were packaged with it. Returning to the main hall would automatically save the character. Usually, the state of the adventure that was exited was lost upon returning and could/had-to-be started over. Adventures had two modes. Survival mode was simply finding your way back to the Main Hall; perhaps with some treasures, equipment, and experience added to you characters existence. Quest mode offered a task that the player could succeed (or perhaps fail) at before returning to the Main Hall; also perhaps with perks. Dying in an adventure means permanent death of the character. Basic character attributes were preserved between adventures plus the player could carry up to four weapons in the Main Hall (thus use them in other adventures). There were 7 main versions of the Main Hall, plus the Deluxe Version, Softdisk version, and various commercially released versions. Any Eamon adventure or collection of adventures was almost always packaged with a compatible version of the Main Hall (a "Master Disk") (just as any game based on an particular game engine will be packaged with a compatible versions of said game engine). Each adventure required its own 'adventure disk', some required more than one. Notably, adventures that shared the same version of the Main Hall could be used together (ie: the player's character could transfer between them); Kind of as expansions of each other but a more accurate description of the model would be to say it was a modular system. The commercial version by Donald Brown entitled SwordThrust, however, worked by bundling the 1st game with the software and subsequent games were add-ons to the first. SwordThrust The adventures were not inherently cross-platform compatible (in contrast to Z-Machine or AGS games for instance), thus porting to another platform required both porting the adventure and a compatible version of the Main Hall, not just a simple software repackaging.

Notes for UVL editors:
Run the game in a BASIC interpretor environment. During normal play of an adventure, break the program (by pressing Ctrl+C) and type this:
PRINT NR, NA, NE, NM
NR = Number of Rooms
NA = Number of Artifacts (personal weapons are counted so be sure to subtract them)
NE = Number of special Effects
NM = Number of Monsters