Top down, shareware, RPG creation kit for DOS/Windows [ACK]

[ETTiNGRiNDER]

I remember having a game creator kit once that we'd picked up from a shareware catalog (The Software Labs I think... they put shareware on floppies and sold them)

It made top-down RPG sort of games, where you could converse with NPCs, fight monsters, etc. It ran in either DOS or an early Windows (e.g. 3.1) but if I had to say, I'd say it was DOS. You could design maps and place various monsters and stuff. It was graphical, and the graphics were passable for the time but nothing "wow" worthy. Your standard dragons, spiders, blobs, etc for monsters. VGA color I think. It was strictly 2D, no first-person dungeon crawling or any of that.

I forget what, if any, the shareware limits were (it could have been freeware, or one of those "I just trust you" sharewares...) But I do remember it being kind of glitchy (and/or my floppy had become corrupted...)

IIRC the sample adventure it came with eventually had you travelling to a communist country of some sort (but still fantasy themed).

I am fairly sure that the word "Adventure" was part of the title, but it was NOT a Sierra style / point & click adventure maker.

Would love to know what this was. I haven't had much luck turning it up again.

[Quadko]

It looks like there were two things called the Adventure Creation Kit and Adventure Construction Set that turned out ultima-esque RPG games. Worth a look?

CRPG Addict discussing ACS
ACS Google Images
ACK Google Screenshots

[Quadko]

Also, if you are interested, there are a lot of modern game creation toolkits/engines out there, I hear.

The one I paid attention to was the open source Nazghul engine / Haxima sample game. I had fun playing around with that a few years ago. Looks like a SourceForge link is best place to start: http://sourceforge.net/projects/nazghul/

[MrFlibble]

I am fairly sure that the word "Adventure" was part of the title, but it was NOT a Sierra style / point & click adventure maker.

You can try looking through the games at archive.org's Classic PC Games Collection (DEMU) that contain the word "Adventure" in the title:
https://archive.org/search.php?query=ad ... sicpcgames

There are certainly several DOS top-down RPGs featured there, maybe the one you're looking for too.

Theodor Lauppert also has an entry about RPG games on his site:
http://theodor.lauppert.ws/games/rpgmaker.htm

[ETTiNGRiNDER]

Thanks guys... it looks like an early version of ACK is very likely to have been what I had back in the day. It's got the sort of graphics I remember and it was apparently shareware in the beginning.