Talespin

Talespin is a video game in the adventure genre and published by MicroDeal Ltd. originally released in 1989. It is currently playable on Amiga, Atari ST.

Talespin is an adventure game creation system made by Mark Heaton and his family (his wife and five children), which allows you to create interactive graphics and text oriented adventure games, demos, books, tutorials or any application you can think of. It offers graphics, 100 development commands, mouse control, no copy protection, hard disk support, and Telltale, a runtime module that allows users without Talespin to view your work.

Talespin also includes two sample adventure games: The Grail, made by 19-year-old Rudyard Heaton, and The Wolf, made by another artist.

The design idea driving Talespin is a 'page' constructed of drawings, text and sound. Conditions and variables control the text, graphics and action/solution possibilities, and all pages link together to form a complete story sequence. The option to chain to the title on the page allows you to connect one story to another, linking new or continuing tales on more than one disc.

The paint/drawing program offers Pencil, Spray, Mini-Spray, Blob, Line and Fill functions. The Lens option allows you to zoom in on an area of the screen to work in detail; Undo removes the most recent drawing action. Although Talesplin can handle 512 colors, the ST can only display 16 at a time (due to a hardware limitation); therefore, all drawings on a page must use the same palette. Drawings can be copied from other stories, as can sounds.

Variables allow you to control the flow of text and drawing inputs. Variables must be defined (CONVERSATION, for example), set to a level, and with conditions that will determine subsequent text actions or movement to different pages. Proper configuration of variables, their values and their conditions allows more than one action or solution for a given puzzle or problem.

All menu selections are controlled with the mouse: the pointer highlights, the left button selects. Clicking the right button brings up the development menu. The only oddity of Talespin concerns the text. Clicking on a character's head pops up a bubble, inside which the currently available options appear. The mouse pointer is used to highlight any of the questions; the left button selects it; the program will then perform the appropriate action.

It is possible that we have multiple downloads available when different versions exist.