Stig of the dump (Sherston/Topologika)

New version now available from Topologika You can download a demo version from there.
The Topologika version is now available as a SCORM package from use on your schools VLE. How kewel is that?????

Read Frank Jukes' review

Stig of the Dump was originally a text only adventure based on Clive King's popular children's book. Written on both BBC and 480z (as a sort of bet!) it was the first time I had something that looked at all professional - by the standards of the day. It was submitted to about every publisher I could find at the time and I soon learned not to take rejection letters too seriously. It was finally accepted by the then very small Sherston Software.

Working with Paul-The-Programmer and Barbara Leeham, an artist at school, we took the brave step of adding graphics. Considering this had to run from one 40k floppy disc each pictures was made up of a maximum of 300 draw commands on a mouse controlled drawing program specially written by Paul. The result were pretty good for the time.

Stig was written using an adventure management program based on a design in a book for the ZX81, but it was pretty good and transferred easily to the A3000 when it appeared. The advantage of having a core program like this is that you can concentrate on the interesting bit - constructing the adventure, rather that the dull old programming. With the advent of the A3000 version and access to !Paint I had a shot at doing the graphics myself, and was amazed to find them favourably reviewed (the examples here may have you thinking otherwise).

In 2000 I started working with Topologika on a new version of Stig. Fundamentally the game is the same - the idea that kids do a lot of reading and thinking is central. However, now we have all sorts of groovy technology to play with and the illustrations below show just how far we've been able to come, especially with Glenn Burnett's artistic skills. You need the Shockwave plug-in to see the following.

You can download a PDF version of the manual