Gamefic

Adventure Games and Interactive Fiction

Gamefic 3.0 Released

by Gamefic on January 28, 2024

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

Experimenting with Procedurally Generated Mysteries

by Gamefic on February 28, 2021

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

Gamefic 2.0 Released

by Gamefic on April 25, 2020

Version 2.0 of the Gamefic SDK is available now on RubyGems. Among the new features: Read more

Redstone Postmortem

by Gamefic on November 22, 2017

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

Changes in Gamefic 2.0

by Gamefic on October 25, 2017

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

Redstone: A Parser/Choice Hybrid for IFComp

by Gamefic on May 22, 2017

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

Using Character States to Handle Data

by Gamefic on April 1, 2017

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

Debugging Games in the Browser

by Gamefic on April 1, 2017

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

A New Visual Studio Code Extension for Ruby

by Gamefic on March 20, 2017

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

Ideals and Goals

by Gamefic on February 5, 2017

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