The Dragon Bane II Adventure Construction Kit (DB2ACK) allows content developers to create entire new adventures that will run on the Dragon Bane II engine for PalmOS. The adventure construction kit is free, but there are a few limitations to distribution of new adventures built using the kit (see the Licensing and Terms of Use section).

Building a new adventure requires creative ideas for the puzzles and story, lots of gaming experience in order to build a well-balanced and challenging world, as well as basic computer skills to use the DB2ACK. This documentation assumes you are computer literate.

This documentation assumes you know how to run programs from a command prompt, edit text files, and it assumes you are very comfortable manipulating files and directories. Although this first release of the Adventure Construction Kit does not include Macintosh or tools for non-Windows platforms, it would be very simple for anyone to re-compile the tools in this development kit on any platform, so we believe future versions will support other platforms. Please see the section on Support and Tools for more information.

Playing Multiple Adventures:

Like the "Return of Kra'an" adventure that comes with the Dragon Bane II engine, any third party adventure will also only be playable in demo mode up through the first three levels. But any user that has registered "Dragon Bane 2: Return of Kra'an" from MythoLogical Software will be able to play all third party adventures from beginning to end. So if you want to commercialize your adventure, you may wish to only distribute the first three levels to the general public and then email the full adventure to your own registered users. Of course, users will still be able to continue their old save games so long as your demo and full adventures have the same name.

The engine allows for multiple adventures to be stored on the device at the same time. When the user runs the game, he or she is prompted to choose an adventure from a list. After beginning play, all save games for each adventure will be stored in a separate, single save database which is backed up to the user's desktop at hotsync. If the user wishes to play a different adventure, he or she can either exit and restart the game, or select the "New" option from the menu.

In a future version, MythoLogical Software will also provide a mechanism in the game for users to "beam" adventures (as well as the Dragon Bane II game) to friends (this feature should be ready by V 1.1.0). Of course, license keys cannot be shared by users, so any games beamed to a new user must be registered before they can be played beyond the first three levels.

Suggestions for Designing a New Adventure:

Designing and building a large adventure is probably a lot more work than you think (especially if you intend to start from scratch and design everything). If your ideas are larger than your personal resources, you may wish to consider collaborating with other adventure designers. Designing and building adventures is a task that lends itself well to a team effort. One person may be good at story telling and writing text, another may be good programming and implementing map specials, while another may be good at art and designing tiles and walls. By working with other DB2ACK users, you will be able to create larger, more interesting worlds than might otherwise be possible, while getting to focus on the aspects of game design you like best.

If you wish to join an adventure in progress or organize your own development team, feel free to use the Dragon Bane II Yahoo web forum to advertise your services or recruit. Working from a common development tree can be a challenge in cases where two or more developers want to edit the same file at the same time. You may want to setup your own source server (as an ftp site), or use email to transfer files between team members, or you could try using something like sourceforge.net which is a website used to manage software development projects.

Of course each designer has his or her own ideas for what makes a good adventure. If you didn't, you probably wouldn't be reading this. However, we would like to share a few pointers we learned as suggestions for building your adventure. Most of them are common sense, so you may skip this section if you are already pretty clear on what to do when designing your own adventure. Here are some do's and don't's for creating an adventure:

Do's:

• Include enough maps or levels in the game so that you can have a continuing evolution of harder monsters available that allow for a player's characters to advance past level 13 (where they have access to level 4 spells)
• Include at least one or two interesting new puzzles on each level. Players don't like endless rooms and hallways filled with monsters and keys and locks. You should always try to present some challenge to the player that does not involve combat before rewarding them with a key to a locked door.
• Try to balance the most significant actors in the game. If there is a trap or monster that can poison your party, be sure there are adequate antedotes (spells or spell objects) available to characters at that level. If you create an armor with high magic resistance, be sure there are monsters that inflict magic damage, etc.

Don't's:

• Don't design puzzles that require: a simple brute force solution, some knowledge outside the game, or one that can be circumvented by saving before trying something and re-loading if your attempt failed.
• Don't design anything that can kill off the player's party. For example, don't put a trap that inflicts a lot of damage that can't be avoided or detected. Don't put a puzzle that kills the party or does a huge amount of damage if they give a wrong answer.
• Don't make puzzles that are too obscure. No one will figure out that you have to shuttle back and forth between two remote spots 5 times in a row in order to open a door unless you have very good clues. No one will type in an answer to a question, if the clue is not distinct.

Sharing Data between Adventures:

Although just about everything in the game can be customized, most adventure creators will probably not go to the trouble to re-create everything. To conserve space on users' devices, adventures are divided into three files, some of which may be shared between two or more adventures. Before you begin working on your new adventure, you should decide how much you plan to change from the original "Return of Kra'an" adventure, and which of the following three databases you need to build and distribute with your adventure.

• Adventure.pdb (i.e. "ReturnKraan.pdb"). The adventure palm database contains all the non-graphical data in an adventure. It includes data such as maps, text, characters, spells, objects, monsters, and other elements. You must create a new adventure pdb for each new adventure you construct -- even if you intend to re-use some or all of the data from the ReturnKraan.pdb.
• Tiles.pdb (i.e. "Tiles256Shade.pdb"). This palm database contains all of the tile graphic files compressed into one big palm database. Tiles are the graphics displayed in the top-left (or top-right for lefty mode) of the Party View screen. Tiles are used for characters, monsters, buildings, and objects. If your adventure does not require any new tiles that do not come with the "Return of Kra'an" adventure, then you do not need to create a new Tiles database.
• Walls.pdb (i.e. "Walls256Shade.pdb"). This palm database contains both graphic brushes (bitmap files) used to construct views of walls, as well as other data used to construct containing descriptions of each wall in the game. If you are not going to be creating new walls (or modifying existing ones) in your adventure, then you don't need to create a new Walls.pdb.

Note that for both the wall and tile pdbs, if you need to create that database type, you will actually be creating three of them: one for 4 shade, 16 shade, and 256 color graphics.

Example:
Suppose you want to create a new adventure called "My Big Adventure" that has all new characters with new tiles and all new maps, but re-uses all the other data from "Return of Kra'an" such as monsters, spells, and objects, etc. In that case, you would need to create the following databases:

1) All adventures require you to create an adventure pdb file. So you will need to create something like an: "MyBigAdventure.pdb".

2) Because you will be creating new tiles for your characters, you will need to build three new tile pdbs: (i.e. "MBATiles4.pdb", "MBATiles16.pdb", "MBATiles256.pdb").

Note that you do not need to create your own set of wall pdbs because you will be re-using the three "Wall*Shade.pdb" data files that come with Dragon Bane II (and that you presume are already installed on the user's device).

In the adventure pdb, there are two data types listed in your pdb config file that specify which wall and tile pdbs are associated with that adventure pdb. In this example, we would want to create a new tile pdb and would reference it with something like "RT MBATiles". But we would re-use the Return of Kra'an walls pdb and reference it with "RW Drg2Walls".

For more information on how to construct pdb's and associate wall, tile, and adventure pdb's into an adventure, see the section on Mkpdbs.