For the past few months, I've been working on a game that uses an experimental new interface. I recently finished the first draft and have enough confidence in it that I plan to enter it in this year's IFComp. Read more
Most of my recent Gamefic work has concentrated on the Web platform, i.e., games designed to run in browsers. I like the potential for creative interfaces and wide distribution. Since browsers provide the capability to send and receive structured data, updating the client with basic HTML seems like an unnecessary limitation. To that end, I've added a new feature: character state. Read more
Since I started using VS Code for most of my development, I've been eager for the ability to run Gamefic stories in a debugger. The Ruby extension makes debugging relatively easy for most Ruby programs. The challenging part was running a debugger against browser-based versions of games. Thanks to a new feature I've added to the SDK, now there's a solution. Read more
Working on Gamefic has had the unexpected side effect of leading me to work on IDEs. Originally I wanted to make authoring software for Gamefic, but that project gradually turned into a suite of general-purpose Ruby tools. One of those tools is code completion: the ability for editors to recommend snippets of code that fit what you're trying to do. This weekend I released the code completion tool as a Ruby gem and a Visual Studio Code extension. Read more
I wanted to take an opportunity to discuss some aspects of the Gamefic project and my objectives behind it. I've been working on it sporadically for about five years, but only recently have I been able to dedicate a significant amount of time to it. Development of the framework is ramping up and new game projects are on the horizon. Here's an impromptu list of my thoughts. Read more
The latest updates to Gamefic include a new scene architecture to simplify customization. Authors can specify code blocks for the scene's beginning and ending, customize the prompt, and more. Read more
Version 1.2 of Gamefic and the SDK are on RubyGems. This release features new versions of the CLI executables with inline help and improved error handling. Read more
A while back I quietly introduced an improvement to dynamic entities. It's always been possible to generate entities at runtime, but for a long time they weren't compatible with snapshots. In other words, any entity created at runtime would be lost in an undo or restore. Gamefic 1.0 was the first release to handle dynamic entities properly in snapshots. The latest version extends this capability with a new feature called subplots. Read more
Today I released Version 1 of Gamefic and the Gamefic SDK. This release is significant for several reasons: Read more
I've been experimenting with player bots for interactive fiction. Besides being a fun exercise, I thought they might be a useful debugging tool. I even thought they might be able to prove the "validity" of a story model, e.g., that the story can never be played into an unfinishable state. I'm not sure that's possible with a non-trivial story, but I figured I'd give it a shot. Read more
Gamefic is an open-source Ruby framework for adventure games and interactive fiction. Most of the games on this site are playable in your browser for free. Play a game now or learn how to make your own.
Redstone: A Parser/Choice Hybrid for IFComp
Using Character States to Handle Data
Debugging Games in the Browser
A New Visual Studio Code Extension for Ruby
Gamefic 1.2 and Upcoming Changes
