The Scroll

THE SCROLL: TEXT ADVENTURE CREATOR

Write the kind of text adventure we played on Spectrums, Commodores and Ataris in the 80s, then play it on real 8-bit and 16-bit machines or in any web browser. No programming knowledge or AI required.

---

WHAT IT IS

The Scroll is a tool that runs in your web browser. Press Run tool above to use it right here, or download the single HTML file and open it on your own computer, even offline.

As a lifelong text game adventurer who started with Twin Kingdom Valley on the Commodore Plus/4, I wanted to create a tool that helps others enjoy and create their own text adventure games with zero coding knowledge.

Below you will find a full tutorial video of how to get the most out of The Scroll.  Your feedback and comments are appreciated.

The games you make can be played two ways: in any web browser (perfect for itch.io), or on real 8-bit and 16-bit computers, from the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 to the Amiga, Atari ST and PC.

I made The Scroll so that you can make games without AI. There is no AI inside: no language model, no subscription, no account. The idea generator picks from lists, the story doctor follows fixed rules, and the picture tracer and tape builder are ordinary code running in your browser. Just a tool and your imagination.

---

HOW IT WORKS

The Scroll walks you through it, one step at a time:

• Premise and story arc: your title, a one-sentence story, and how the player wins. Short of ideas? It will suggest some.
• Rooms: write each location and choose its exits, with a map that draws itself and warns you about one-way exits and rooms nobody can reach.
• Pictures: draw room pictures line by line, so they draw themselves in like the classics, or trace a photo. See how they will look on the Spectrum, C64, MSX and Amstrad.
• Photo converter: turn your own photos or paintings into Spectrum pictures dot by dot, like Image to ZX Spec: full colour or black and white, Atkinson, Floyd-Steinberg or ordered dots, and a mode that keeps one colour, such as green grass in a black and white world. It makes loading screens too.
• Objects, quests and characters: locked doors, guardians, trades, dark rooms and hidden treasure, ready to fill in.
• Rules: levers, timers, deaths, points, wandering characters and secret passages, with ten ready-made recipes.
• Play-test: play as you write. The Scroll finds the winning route and warns you about dead ends where the game can no longer be won.
• Story doctor: a tester's read-through of your whole game, with fixes and ideas.
• Already written a game in DAAD? Bring in its .DSF file and pictures. Your rooms, objects and pictures appear in The Scroll to edit, your own code is kept exactly as written, and you can play-test it straight away, make Spectrum tapes in one click, and export packs for every other machine.
• Memory is a restriction on 8-bit machines.  As you create your game, you can see the memory usage increase in the bottom right.
• Your game is saved in your browser cache, but as this can be cleared from time to time, I created an export that outputs a json file, to ensure your work stays safe and can be loaded back up easily.
• With one click, The Scroll builds a ready-to-upload itch.io pack: your playable web game, downloads for real 8-bit machines, cover art, screenshots and your game’s page text.

---

WHERE YOUR GAME RUNS

About twenty machines, most of them in one click:

• ZX Spectrum: ready-to-play 48K and 128K tapes and a Spectrum +3 disk, with your pictures and a loading screen, built right in your browser with DAAD, the adventure system Aventuras AD used in the 80s. The +3 disk loads each picture as you enter the room, so even a big game can have a photo in every room. Nothing else to install.
• Commodore 64 and Plus/4, Amstrad CPC and PCW, MSX and MSX2, SAM Coupe, ZX81, Atari ST, Amiga, MS-DOS and Spectrum Next, also through DAAD with pictures. These need disk images, so The Scroll gives you a pack for Uto's free DAAD Ready kit (any version from DAAD Ready B on), with step-by-step instructions.
• Atari 8-bit, Apple II, BBC Micro, Commodore machines and modern computers, as an Infocom-style Z-machine story file.
• Dragon 32, Dragon 64 and Tandy CoCo, as a BASIC program on a cassette image.
• Any web browser: one page you can upload straight to itch.io, with saving, undo, pictures and, if you like, your own music with an on/off button.

---

GETTING STARTED

Press Run tool, then Getting started in the menu. Three small, complete adventures (a haunted house, a dragon's cave and a derelict space station) are there to learn from and change.

Your story saves in your browser as you go. Use Back up (or Save and load) to download a copy now and then. If an export button doesn't download here, grab the downloadable version below and open it from your computer: everything works there, even offline.

I have created a complete tutorial video here:  

---

THANKS

DAAD was written by Tim Gilberts for Aventuras AD, with Andres Samudio. DRC, MALUVA and DAAD Ready are by Uto. The English DAAD start database was recreated by Stefan Vogt. The Z-machine was designed at Infocom by Joel Berez and Marc Blank. The Quill, by Graeme Yeandle and Gilsoft, started it all in 1983. The Spectrum tape builder is a JavaScript port of DRC (Uto and Jose Manuel Ferrer, GPL v3) and of DAAD Ready's tape tools, with pictures packed by a port of ZX0 by Einar Saukas (BSD licence). DAAD games play in the browser in jDAAD, Uto's web DAAD interpreter, which uses jQuery (MIT licence). Games made with DAAD are free to share, so the 8-bit versions of your game must be given away free.

---

LICENCE

The Scroll is free software under the GNU GPL v3 (it contains a port of DRC, which is GPL). The download is the complete source. Your games are yours: the player code The Scroll puts in them is not covered by the GPL.  

Donations are not mandatory, but if you do, they are very much appreciated my fellow text adventurer.