Since I first played Adventure Construction Set on the Commodore 64, I’ve been a big fan of games that let you create your own worlds. The more detailed, the better. After the fourteen-year-old me played through Rivers of Light and dissected it with the editor, I created many an adventure. I assembled fantasy worlds where I created my own magic swords, my own versions of manticores and wyverns, and my own castles and dungeons. I created a remake of The Goonies after having seen the movie for the first time. The restaurant, the tunnels beneath, the pursuing Fratellis, and One-Eyed Willy’s pirate ship. I also remember adding a toilet that would attack you in the basement of the restaurant for some reason. I probably just thought it was funny.
The Adventure Construction Set was a fun start for the twelve-year-old me, but it was just the beginning. I don’t think I got into videogame world-creation again until my adult life, when Neverwinter Nights was released with its Aurora Engine. The C-like language that they gave you enabled me to program my own rules for resting, where you were only allowed to set camp once per day, and you had a chance to be interrupted by wandering monsters. At an inn, you healed fully and there was no chance of monsters.
Neverwinter’s scripting engine allowed me to set scripted events, triggers, and traps, and do more than you’d ever expect. All in all, I spent a good year creating my Neverwinter Nights adventure. I think there was only once person who ever played it, and not to completion, but I had fun and learned a lot.
Today, games like LittleBigPlanet allow people to create some pretty amazing things, but as a console game, it can’t have as deep a toolset as a PC counterpart could have.
Andrew Armstrong brings things a bit further, incorporating RTS games and Sim City into his construction theme. I suppose that if I expanded like that, the one game I’d certainly include is Dungeon Keeper. The game is ancient, but it’s still very good.
In closing, I really enjoy games that allow me to create worlds, but the whole operation is so time-consuming that I can only really get into it once every ten or fifteen years.
