Prior to developing
The Count, its developer
Scott Adams was the first person to sell
text adventure games. His first was a version of
Adventure released in 1978.
The Count was developed in the late 1970s and was the fifth game in Adams'
Adventure series of video games which began with
Adventureland (1978). Each of these games took about a month to develop. For
The Count, Adams wanted to add new features to the game which included a day and night cycle in the game to have it exist over several days. Adams said that "Dracula is a creature of the night, the player is a creature of the day, so I was going to need multiple days to tell the story." As the game was
text adventure, he had little memory for the text in the game and counted on players being familiar with imagery from
Dracula and
Frankenstein stories and could get too in-depth with text for describing scenarios. To develop the gameplay Adams envisioned the setting in his mind and what items would populate these areas and how they could be used in a puzzle. Testing these puzzles grew out of playtesting them with friends and family. This involved creating a few rooms and selectable items and watching them play, noting any bugs or how players would try to tackle the problems. Adams never storyboarded a game and said that he often had no idea where the narrative would go. ==Release==