page_title: Adventure Construction Set
section_title: Construction system
hierarchical_section_title: Adventure Construction Set / Construction system
caption_attribution_description: English: A room built in Adventure Construction Set on an Amiga using a fully custom tile set.
context_page_description: Adventure Construction Set is a computer game creation system written by Stuart Smith that is used to construct tile-based graphical adventure games. ACS was originally published by Electronic Arts in 1984 on the Commodore 64, and was later ported to the Apple II, Amiga, and MS-DOS. It was one of EA's biggest hits of 1985, earning a Software Publishers Association "Gold Disk" award.
  ACS provides a graphical editor for the construction of maps, placement of creatures and items, and a simple menu-based scripting to control game logic. A constructed game is stored on its own disk which can be copied and shared with friends. For some ports the ACS software is still needed to play user-constructed games.
  Included with the system is a complete game, Rivers of Light, based on the Epic of Gilgamesh. It features art by Smith and Connie Goldman and music by Dave Warhol. The Amiga version of ACS has art by Greg Johnson and Avril Harrison and an additional pre-made adventure called "Galactic Agent" by Ken St Andre.
  Titles influenced by ACS include The Elder Scrolls Construction Set.
context_section_description: Adventure Construction Set was designed to make tile-based graphical adventure games similar to author Stuart Smith's earlier games Return of Heracles and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.
  The framework of an adventure built within ACS is organized into the following main categories:
  "World map": This is the top-level map from which characters begin their adventure. The world map differs from other playable areas of the game in that it has no fixed creature encounters, no stacked tiles, quicker movement, it is scrollable, and it optionally may wrap around (have no borders.) Random encounters may occur on the world map, during which the game switches to a special view similar to a "room" to handle the encounter.
  "Regions": A region is a collection of rooms. A region is a construction concept and does not present itself to the player, except by indirect means such as disk access when traveling between regions.
  "Rooms": A room is a rectangular, tiled area of a size which must fit within the game's viewport. Tiles may be used to make a room look like shapes other than rectangular.
  "Things": A thing is a background tile, obstacle, or collectible item.
  "Creatures"
  "Pictures": These are art assets used by the tiles. For some platforms, four colors are available for images. For the Amiga platform, 32 colors are available, each of which can be assigned to be any of 4096 available colors.
  Tiles may be stacked. Only the top tile of a stack may be directly interacted with by the player, however special tiles allow for game-logic to be implemented via the stack. For example, a tile may be set to "Activate All Things at This Place". Tiles may also allow or disallow interaction based on the contents of the player's inventory, or activate if a specific object is dropped on top of the stack.
  Spell-effects may be attached to Things.
  The game allows for somewhat varied monster AI behavior. A creature may be specified to behave solely as a "fighter" or "slinker", or adjust its temperament based on its condition. In addition, it may be specified as either an "enemy", "friend", "neutral", or "thief", with a total of 8 possible behavioral patterns expressed.
  There are maximum quotas applied to most categories in the game (including the total number of unique things, text messages, pictures, regions, creatures per region, things per region, and rooms per region.) These limits restrict the size of adventures. For example, "Each adventure can contain up to 15 regions and each region can contain up to 16 rooms."
  ACS included a framework for fantasy adventures, as well as starter toolkits for fantasy, futurist, and "spy" game genres.
caption: A room built with a custom tile set (Amiga)
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