My team of tester friends have been reporting issues for the last few weeks, and I've been busy fixing them.

Nothing impacts more a project than wasted time, and nothing impacts more the quality of the work than the iteration time between when something is changed and when you finally see it in the final game.

When it comes to text adventures and point-and-click games, less is often more. In this article I look at how adventure game interfaces evolved from complex natural language parsers to simple contextual actions, and why I chose a minimalist approach for Encounter.

When I started playing adventure games back in the 80ies, there were basically two types of game implementations:

• Games written as actual programs
• Games using some portable virtual machine or database
  

Now and then somebody speaks of the "game" Shadow of the Beast and uses it as an example of something the Amiga range of computers could do but the Atari ST could never dream to achieve.

This is totally true: Even with all the time and talent of the universe, there is no way a standard Atari 520 ST could compete, in what is after all mostly a technical demo designed to exploit every single feature the Amiga had.

The actual point of contention is regarding if the Atari ST port of Shadow of the Beast was as good as it could possibly have been considering the usual constraints of time, budget, etc...