How to build an Adventure Game with ScummC and ScummC Tools
This page is under construction!
Before you consider to build an adventure game with ScummC, read the following restrictions, please:
- SCUMM adventures uses 8-bit graphics. So you can only display 256 colors at the same time. Think about that your main character and your graphical user interface (including all item icons) need some colors permanently. Normally less than 200 colors remain for the background image. This requires a good color management! Be sure that you know enough about color table based graphics. Here is an example background from Monkey Island 2 that shows an exemplary allocation of the 256 colors.
- The x-position, y-position, width and height of all hotspot objects must be a multiple of 8 pixels! This should be kept in mind when drawing small objects for interaction. They should be aligned by the grid, as shown in this example background from Secret of Monkey Island. The smallest possible hotspot is therefore 8 x 8 pixels in size (for this reason, there was never pixel hunting in SCUMM games).
- All character animation frames or other animations (called 'costume') can use up to 32 colors only. That means, a costume uses up to 32 colors from the current color table of the room. If you want to use a costume in different rooms, then you have to reserve the color table fields of the costume in all these rooms. This applies to the playable main character, for example.
Except of music files (for MIDI music I will write an extra chapter someday) there are only 5 different resource file types that we have to handle for building SCUMM-Games:
| File Type | Description | Tool for creation/edit | |
|---|---|---|---|
 |
*.scc/sch | ScummC-Scripts (Version 6) and ScummC-Headers as normal text files | Use your favorite texteditor. |
 |
*.room | Room resources with images, palettes, objects, walk-behinds, walk boxes | Use the ROOM-Editor. Make a double click on any ROOM file and edit it directly. |
 |
*.char | Fonts for subtitles, user interface or any other text output | Use the CHAR-Editor. Make a double click on any CHAR file and edit it directly. |
 |
*.cost | Animation sets of characters or any other animations (called 'costume') | Use the COST-Editor. Make a double click on any COST file and edit it directly. |
 |
*.voc | Sounds and speech (Creative Voice File, proprietary file format, 8-bit unsigned mono at 22 or 11 kHz) | To convert any sound files to VOC, use a sound converter like SoX for example. It's free and available for all platforms. |
In terms of the file structure of your adventure project, I recommend the following scheme (for example here you can see all used files of the OpenQuest game):
To compile these files into a playable package, you need two tools from the ScummC project:
- SSC - The Scumm Compiler
- SLD - The Scumm Linker
At the moment I am trying to understand and modify these two tools. All other tools and utilities from the ScummC project are not needed anymore! Their tasks are performed by the editors now. I hope this makes the adventure creation with ScummC much easier.
If process has finished without errors then you get these files:
- game.000
- game.001
- game.sou
Now you can add your game to the ScummVM library. Have fun playing!