The Bard's Tale Construction Set
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| The Bard's Tale Construction Set | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Developer(s) | Interplay Productions |
| Publisher(s) | Electronic Arts |
| Platform(s) | Amiga, DOS |
| Release | 1991 |
| Genre(s) | RPG |
| Mode(s) | Editor |
The Bard's Tale Construction Set is computer software that allows the user to create simple dungeon crawl video games using The Bard's Tale game engine. It was created by Interplay Productions in 1991 and distributed by Electronic Arts. It was released for the Amiga and IBM-PC/MS-DOS.
Since it was not required to own The Bard's Tale Construction Set in order to play games which were created with it, one could easily (and legally) distribute his or her own created games among other people.
Sample scenario
Included with the software was a sample scenario for the purpose of playing and learning from, entitled Star Light Festival.
Set in the small rundown village of Isil Thania, a band of adventurers has travelled from afar to witness the annual Star Light Festival in which an eerie light comes down from a star for one night only making the night into day.
While awaiting the Festival at the Rainbow Bar, a small twisted man leads you into the sewers (which feature the same maps found in the original Bard's Tale game), and from there you engage upon a quest that takes you from one location in the city to the next, eventually to find the secret truths behind the Star Cult and the town of Isil Thania.
Playing the sample scenario reveals that several changes have taken place since Bard's Tale III. Characters accumulate experience much more slowly, and the scroll message window seems unpolished, often dropping parts of words down to the next line without a hyphen, an effect that some players find distracting.
The sample scenario, while inventive in many ways, still only utilizes four different wall pattern types, making the game's visual appearance highly repetitive over time.
Created games
The following games are known to have been created using The Bard's Tale Construction Set:
- The Bard's Lore: The Warrior and The Dragon, by John H. Wigforss (PC, 1998)
The following games were started but remain incomplete:
- Nutilan, by Dennis Payne (PC, 2000)
(It should be noted that since the software pre-dated the modern Internet, the vast majority of games created with it never found widespread distribution on-line, and have faded into obscurity.)
Trivia
Feargus Urquhart served as a play tester for The Bard's Tale Construction Set, and went on to found the game companies Black Isle Studios and Obsidian Entertainment.
External links
- The Bard's Tale Compendium
- The Bard's Tale Construction Set at MobyGames
- Bt Builder - an attempt to create an open source implementation of The Bard's Tale Construction Set.