After four months of work, I’ve completed a new coding project!
It’s an interactive fiction game engine. It lets you create text adventures – those games before the age of computer graphics that played like a novel unfolding before your eyes. The player would write what they wanted to do in plain language, and the game would understand that and spit out what happened next.
There are tons of game engines like this out there. I wrote mine because I wanted to write interactive fiction, and I wanted to write it in a way that was intuitive to me. I also wanted to have games playable through a web browser and that could be written in languages other than English.
I created a declarative language for creating the games. Instead of programming the game by specifying what each step was to get to a final result, I made it so I could define rules for how things were related, and the game engine would figure out the rest.
I’m very proud of what I’ve put together. Next up is writing the interactive fiction I’ve been meaning to create and putting that online.
You can download the source code at GitHub.
If you’re interested in writing interactive fiction, I would recommend downloading and using Inform 7 rather than what I’ve put together. Writing stories in Inform 7 is more intuitive to non-programmers, it has great documentation, and is just much more mature of a product.