3D Construction Kit

For four years Incentive had been the only company that could build a Freescape world. Driller, Dark Side, Total Eclipse and Castle Master all came from the same solid-3D system, and CRASH explained that they “were created by typing in lists of coordinates (a very tricky business)”. In 1991 Incentive put menus and a pointer on the front of that system and sold it. The 3D Construction Kit, published by Domark at £24.99, let anyone with a Spectrum, Amstrad, Commodore 64, ST, Amiga or PC build a 3D world they could walk round, turn it into a game, and hand copies to their friends.

“3D Construction Kit isn’t actually a game,” James Leach warned Your Sinclair’s readers. “It’s a way of creating games.”

Fast facts

• Made by: Incentive Software, using its Freescape system.
• Published by: Domark, at £24.99 on Spectrum cassette or disk.
• Released: 1991. CRASH reviewed it in May.
• Output: stand-alone programs that ran without the kit.
• In the box: a thick manual and a tutorial video.
• In North America: sold by Domark as Virtual Reality Studio.
• Sequel: 3D Construction Kit 2, 1992.

Building a world

Your Sinclair compared it to Lego. You started with an area, the equivalent of a baseplate, which could be “the inside of a building, a street, a universe”. You picked a shape from a list and placed it. CRASH listed “hexagons, triangles, cubes, lines and pentagons”, which you could “stretch, shrink, turn and shade”. Your Sinclair’s step-by-step house was a cube stretched into a box, with a pyramid stretched over it for a roof and a door added at the front. At any point you could walk or fly round your work to look at it from any angle, the way a player would.

A game could have “as many areas as memory will allow”, and memory was the limit a builder met first. Storing every object in every room was “very memory hungry”, CRASH said, so the kit had global objects: define four walls and a ceiling once and reuse them in each room. You could also shrink the window the player looked through. “The smaller you have it the faster things will scroll by”: a smaller window meant fewer pixels for the Spectrum to fill each time the view changed. A screen drawn in any art program could be loaded as the border and status panel, with lines for text, score, energy and lives.

Giving it rules

Shapes alone made a model, not a game. The Conditions menu gave objects behaviour in what Your Sinclair called “a sort of customised BASIC”. CRASH’s example was IF SHOT THEN GOTO AREA 2; Your Sinclair’s hid an object until the player walked into it:

INVIS 005
IFHIT OBJECT 005 THEN VIS 005

Objects could be shot, picked up, moved or made visible, doors could lead to other areas, and sensors made something react when the player came near, “a monster firing at you for example”. This was how the Freescape games had worked all along. CRASH pointed out that shooting blocks had built stairs in Total Eclipse, and a switch had opened the drawbridge in Castle Master.

When the game was finished, a compiler saved it as a program that loaded without the kit, so the player could not change anything. CRASH suggested building worlds “for pleasure or even monetary gain”, and Your Sinclair asked readers to send in what they made for its covertape.

The video in the box

Domark included a tutorial video. Sinclair User said new users would be “horrified to find that there are 33 separate icons to click on” in the main window, and advised: “The best way to tackle this apparent nightmare is to switch off the computer and turn on the video.” Its review also praised the manual, which “would not look out of place in The Old Testament”. A copy of the tape has since been digitised and is held by the Internet Archive.

Reviews

CRASH’s Nick Roberts called it “an excellent game creation utility”. Your Sinclair made it a Megagame with 94 and called it “an absolutely incredible piece of software”. It was “not something you can dive into at first sitting”, James Leach admitted, but it was “not at all complicated once you’ve sussed it out”, and it ran in 48K mode. Sinclair User gave it 91% in September 1991 and called it “a stunning achievement on the home computer”, all the better for its “ease of use, manual and video”. Its reviewer thought the kit would “nurture the beginnings of many a new programmer”. The same issue reviewed Virtual Worlds, a Domark compilation of four Freescape games, and noted how neatly it tied in with the kit.

Virtual Reality Studio and the sequel

In North America Domark sold the kit as Virtual Reality Studio, distributed by Accolade. AC’s Guide to the Commodore Amiga listed the Amiga version in 1992 at $89.95, “designed by Incentive Software”.

Incentive followed it with 3D Construction Kit 2, which PC Review previewed in August 1992. By then, the magazine said, the engine was showing its age, but Incentive had listened to its users, “particularly those in the dedicated user group”. The new version added animated bitmap sprites, movement between areas without programming, and a recorder that played back a walk-through at variable speed. The One listed it at £34.99 at the start of 1993. Amiga Action doubted that its 3D would ever run fast enough for serious games, and expected it to appeal mainly to “Sunday programmers and PD people”. The North American edition was Virtual Reality Studio 2.0.

It was the second time Incentive had sold its own tools. Six years earlier the Graphic Adventure Creator had put adventure writing in its customers’ hands.

See also

• Freescape
• Incentive Software
• Ian Andrew
• Domark
• Graphic Adventure Creator
• Driller