So, I got this in the racial justice and equality bundle and is there a manual for this? I have no idea what I'm doing!
Viewing post in ADLENGINE - Roleplay / Text Adventure Engine comments
Hi, it actually wasn't meant to end up in the bundle, the links went all awry and this got added by accident, its no longer in development (as support for the language it was written is was stopped)
However I am looking at potentially open-sourcing it in the future / rewriting it.
Here is a list of commands :) https://trello.com/b/EE0Z7oWX/build-your-own-adventure-with-adlengine
When you're done checking out Quest, look up Squiffy (by the same group) and then Inform 7.
Squiffy is closest to the basic Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book format, updated for a digital environment and with minimal support for variables and such. But it works as webpage code (JavaScript?) and thus can be hosted just like a webpage.
Quest lets you create rooms and such, in a somewhat complicated GUI; I haven't played with it all that much, but it seems useful for small projects.
Inform 7 works from human-readable code (!!), wherein you describe the world and the objects within it, explain how they relate to each other and how they can be interacted with, define new verbs (and interrupts for if the player tries to do something forbidden: "Instead of picking up the car, say 'Do you think you're Superman?'"), all in code that's as close to English as I have ever seen.
So if you want to create a branching story with minimal interactivity, go for Squiffy; if you want to create a text-adventure world with tons of objects that could be manipulated by the player in any number of ways, go for Inform 7.
Thank you! I downloaded Inform 7 and had a look at the documentation and very novel approach at crafting text based digital storytelling.
There are a few quirks and annoyances. Every code update takes much longer than it should, I'll have to look into this (already excluded the programm folder from Windows Defender). The documentation inside the program seems not fully updated to the last iteration, some nomenclature and colours supposedly have been changed). The version I'm running is from 2015, which makes me a little cautious.
Still, it is an easy to use yet powerful tool for sure. I shall continue exploring its possibilites.
If you get around to recreating (or open-sourcing) it, I would like to be notified. I hope that "Follow" is sufficient to let me do this? (I'm not that familiar with this site.) I may not have much time to play text adventures these days, but they do fill me with nostalgia, and I love that people are still developing engines to make them faster and easier than anything I could've done back when I got started programming.
P.S. Look up Inform 7; it's an incredible engine based on human-readable code.