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.

Improvements

  • More reliable snapshots. The new snapshots reduce the "gotchas" involved in writing games that provide save/restore/undo features.
  • Better Opal compatibility. The opal-rspec suite ensures that the library works correctly in Opal environments, reducing unforeseen bugs in web-based game builds.
  • Improved action handling. Dispatching player actions is faster, more intuitive, and more configurable.

New Features

  • Modular architecture. The new scripting architecture makes it easier to manage shared features. Authors can include script modules into their own plots instead of adding script blocks to the base Plot class.
  • Less monkey patching. The modular architecture allows authors to extend game functionality without monkey patching existing classes and modules.
  • Entity seeds. Authors can create "static" entities with special script blocks called seeds. Narratives only run the seeds when a new instance gets created. Restoring a narrative skips the seeds to help ensure that the state of the game world in the snapshot is not changed erroneously.
  • New script methods. The base methods for creating actions, entities, scenes, and other in-game features have been streamlined for ease of use, including reduction of script boilerplate.

See the guides for updated documentation and example code.