Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion

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SCUMM stands for Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion (English for script creation tool for Maniac Mansion ). It is software that was programmed by Ron Gilbert and Aric Wilmunder for Lucasfilm Games in 1987 to simplify the creation of portable point-and-click adventure games .

Technology and development

Before SCUMM existed, Lucasfilm Games had to create a separate version of the game for each computer architecture . With SCUMM only the virtual machine has to be ported once. The game is available with SCUMM as bytecode , which can be executed by the various engines without adaptation. The game designer can concentrate on creating the story, the graphics and music, and the logic.

A game using SCUMM thus consists of two parts:

  • platform-independent bytecode and resources
  • a game engine that is also the virtual machine for SCUMM scripts

As the name suggests, SCUMM (like the game engine) was originally developed for Maniac Mansion, but was later used in many other LucasArts adventure games and expanded and rewritten several times.

The original game engine (SPUTM, SCUMM Presentation Utility TM ) was further developed by LucasArts up to version 8, with numerous extensions such as IMUSE ( Interactive Music Streaming Engine , music enriched with control data), SMUSH (video engine) and INSANE (Event Management) have been added. The game engine version 5 was developed separately up to version 11 by Ron Gilbert for his company Humongous Entertainment .

The scripting language, which SCUMM translates into bytecode, is somewhat similar to the JavaScript programming language , but essentially consists of simple commands ( activate figure X , move figure , speak text ) and, in addition to simple scripting of cutscenes, also allows a kind of multitasking , whereby several actions run at the same time.

Most SCUMM games have a verb-item interface. The character controlled by the player has an inventory, and within the game world there are objects with which the player can interact. Depending on the game, up to 15 verbs are available for this. In The Curse of Monkey Island game , these were reduced to three, namely: "Look at", "Use" ("Use" was context-dependent and could trigger various actions: take, pull, press etc.) and "Talk to" ( could also mean eat, lick, chew, etc. depending on the context).

The puzzles generally involve doing the right activity with the right object, e.g. For example: "Use cookie cutter with other rubber tree". “Talk to” leads to dialog sequences in which the player chooses from a list of the given questions or other utterances, to which the addressed character reacts with a given answer. As an exception to this general paradigm, the game LOOM should be mentioned, which does not use the usual verb-object paradigm, but rather dialogues.

For the last two adventures by LucasArts, Grim Fandango and Escape from Monkey Island , a new engine called GrimE was switched to.

The ScummVM (Scumm Virtual Machine) project has succeeded in developing a free , portable engine based on the SDL library, written in C ++ , which enables the above-mentioned SCUMM games to be played on systems on which the original Versions either cannot run at all or only to a very limited extent.

Code samples

Ron Gilbert published two original code samples from Maniac Mansion at the 2011 Game Developers Conference . The following instructions describe a non-interactive scene between Nurse Edna and Ed: 

cut-scene {
    ...
    actor nurse-edna in-room edna-bedroom at 60,20
    camera-follow nurse-edna
    actor nurse-edna walk-to 30,20
    wait-for-actor nurse-edna
    say-line nurse-edna "WHATS'S YOUR POINT ED!!!"
    wait-for-talking nurse-edna
    ...
}

Games

SCUMM version 0
SCUMM version 1
SCUMM version 1.5
  • Maniac Mansion ( NES version (1990))
SCUMM version 2
  • Maniac Mansion ( Amiga version (1989), Atari ST version (1989), Enhanced PC version (1989))
  • Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders (Amiga version (1988), Atari ST version (1989), Enhanced PC version (1989))
SCUMM version 3
  • Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders ( FM Towns version (1991))
  • Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (PC version (1989), Amiga version (1989), Atari ST version (1989), VGA PC version (1990), Mac version (1990), FM Towns version ( 1990), CDTV version (1992))
  • LOOM (PC version (1990), Amiga version (1990), Atari ST version (1990), Mac version (1990))
SCUMM version 4
  • LOOM ( CD-ROM PC version (1991), FM Towns version (1991), PC Engine version (1992))
  • The Secret of Monkey Island (PC version (1990), VGA PC version (1990), Amiga version (1991), Atari ST version (1991), Mac version (1991))
SCUMM version 5
SCUMM version 6
SCUMM version 7
  • Sam & Max Hit the Road (CD-ROM PC version (1993), Mac version (1996), Windows PC version (2007))
  • Full throttle: Full Throttle (PC version (1995), Mac version (1996), Windows PC version (2002))
  • The Dig (PC version (1995), Mac version (1996), Windows PC version (2002))
SCUMM version 8

See also

  • GrimE , the successor to SCUMM for 3D adventures

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ LucasForums.com: SCUMM script samples from Maniac Mansion ( Memento from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive )