Many years ago I wrote a “choose your own path” adventure game for the iPhone. Its engine was compact, simple and very flexible, even though I wrote it in an afternoon. The game was rubbish and I always thought it deserved better.
Apparently a few years later I rewrote it in .Net possibly with an eye to makeing another app for it. Anyway I think the public probably have more use for it than I do now, so I am making it freely available.
At its heart it is a bunch of “pages” with “options” that take you to other pages. You could write a simple game with just that. It also, however, has variables. These are things like flags, text and numbers. You can display these in the game (“your name is Shaun, you have 6 pickled eggs”) and you can also use them to control what text is displayed and what optiuons are available to the user. Add in the ability to randomise things and you have a game that never plays the same way twice.
Another idea is that the same game can have different front ends. You can play it in a DOS box with coloured text and keyboard input but play it on a phone (iOS and Android coming at some point) and it will be fancy coloured HTML with hyperlinks, pictures and buttons. You could probably even stick it on a web site.
Currently I am just finishing the basic functionality. This includes
- Load
- Save
- Colouring text
- “Hot reload” while editing
- Maybe some sort of validation for game editing