Adventure Games and Interactive Fiction
The latest major update to Gamefic introduces some important structural and architectural changes. Some of them break backwards compatibility, but I felt they were important for long-term maintainability, extensibility, and developer experience. (Note: this post discusses a lot of technical details that explain the reasoning behind the design decisions, but hopefully they don't need much consideration when authoring games.) Read more
Voting in the ParserComp 2024 game jam ended last week. My entry, Project Postmortem, is the first game I've released using Gamefic 3.0. It's a short and simple text adventure that most players should be able to finish in ten or fifteen minutes. My main goal with it was to assure myself that the SDK project template is sufficient for building a playable game. Read more
Version 3.0 of Gamefic is a major rewrite with a new modular architecture. It's easier than ever for authors to organize their code and compose game features from common libraries. The SDK and the standard library have also been updated to take advantage of the new capabilities. Read more
One of my long-term pet projects has been procedurally generated content for mystery games, where the mystery's suspects, clues, and solution are all dynamic. My most recent experiment is a short text game called AKA: Sammy the Blade. The game's objective is to identify a fugitive among the guests at a hotel. The mystery, at its core, is a logic puzzle. Read more
Version 2.0 of the Gamefic SDK is available now on RubyGems. Among the new features: Read more
Redstone finished 33rd in this year's IFComp. All things considered, I'm happy with the outcome. There were a lot of amazing entries this year, and there are plenty of ways that Redstone (and Gamefic itself) could be improved. Read more
Version 2.0 of Gamefic has been in development for several months. I think it's very close to being ready for release; in fact, I used it to make Redstone, my entry in this year's Interactive Fiction Competition. Here's a summary of the changes and new features. Read more
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