[Scummvm-devel] new engine (Composer) for Broderbund adventures

[A. Milburn]

Hello all,

I seem to have accidentally (really, I don't know what happened, I only
started it a week ago) reimplemented the 'Magic Composer' engine developed
by Animation Magic. You can find it in my 'composer' branch of scummvm on
github.

It supports the Broderbund children's adventure games 'Darby the Dragon' and
'Gregory and the Hot Air Balloon', both of which are completeable without
any obvious bugs.

Any objections to merging it? It's a very simple engine - it basically just
keeps track of hotspots and active animations/sprites, and runs simple
scripts to do all of the game logic.

(I'd never heard of these games, although they seem to have quite a few fans.
Strangerke mentioned them to me, after buying the French versions while
looking for Mohawk adventure games, and they looked fun and simple enough to
take a look at -- and both games are very cute and fun, although Gregory's
puzzles are rather too simple to be any challenge to an adult.)

The engine was also used in the 'Magic Tales' interactive books, in some games
released by Knowledge Adventure (e.g. Fisher-Price Ready for School: Reading)
and in the unreleased adventure game Warcraft Adventures.

I have no intention of trying to support any of those, although it seems
likely that the last three Magic Tales books work fine (I only have one of
them, along with the demos on that disc).

- fuzzie

P.S. Since there's a lack of screenshots/etc on the web, you can find a
low-quality filming of ScummVM running Darby the Dragon on youtube at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsEkSgXiv9c - the gameplay starts at 2:30.