Choose Your Own Adventure

[Philip Swartzleonard]

[posted and mailed]

Philipp Lenssen || Sun 05 May 2002 06:10:15a:

> The Python port of QML (Quest Markup Language) interpreter is now
> published in final stage:
> http://questml.com/quests/
> 
> QML, held in XML, enables you to create multiple-choice quests (like
> adventures, or help systems) in easy and cross-browser fashion.
> Feedback welcome!

Looks interesting, even if I don't really like CYOA (choose your own 
adventure) all THAT much =).

Anyway, if you have not alreay done so, you should hook up with the 
Interactive Fiction (text-adventure) community, as the games that you 
are creating are a subset of this kind of work and there are interested 
people there. Oh, and there's already one other programming language (or 
similar) for creating this kind of game, called 'Adventure Gamebook', it 
can be found here:

http://www.ingold.fsnet.co.uk/adbook.htm

This is a different style of program than your system: it looks like it 
compiles to bytecode and runs in an interperter just like python and 
other IF languages (And it can use Inform (one of the standard languages 
for writing regular text-aventure zork-like games)[1] to turn into 
bytecode that can run on any Infocom Z-Macine[2] interperter).

We[3] even had a mini-compatition a few years ago on this kind of CYOA 
game, information on that can be found here:

http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/4746/60974

There are two newsgroups for this artform, which you would be adviced to 
make a notice on. There is 'rec.games.int-fiction' which is for players 
and discussing games that have been made, and 'rec.arts.int-fiction' 
(originally made for hypertext and annexed =), which is for game 
authors, systems programmers, and all concerns about building and 
maintaing games, languages, interperters, and so on. Your place. =)

http://www.firthworks.com/roger/parsifal/index.html

... is a grand list of all the important sites in IF, and anyone that's 
ever done anything for the community that has a web site. It can be hard 
to find stuff if it's on a person's page and you don't know who made it, 
but it has an easy listing of our Library Alexandria (if-archive, and 
the old one did 'burn down' -), and various faqs, one of which will 
point you to IFmud, which is basically a giant IF IRC channel with MUSH 
objects.

Ye-local-IF-community-err-informationist-ly yrz =)

(Also Ye-resident-python-advocate-#2 on r.games.roguelike.devel, so go 
figure =)

~~~@: Useless footnotes:

[1] The other one is called TADS, or the 'Text Adventure Development 
System'. This is personally my choice, TADS over Inform is sort of like 
Python over Perl, or, ya know, language over line noise. IMVHO. Inform's 
also more popular. Like perl. =)

[2] Possibly the first virtual macine ever created, this was used to 
port Infocom's 40-odd games to 30-odd platforms and only really have to 
write system specific code for each platform once. In the modern era, 
the limits of this system are being stretched -so- far, that Inform 
writers are now starting to move over to something called Glulx as a 
compilation target, to allow for multimedia and huge, unlimited internal 
memory. TADS, meanwhile, has addopted an HTML interperter extention.

[3] I join this community every now and then. Play a few games, talk a 
lot, dream about making games, make a few rooms, eventually wander off 
again. =)

-- 
Philip Sw "Starweaver" [rasx] :: www.rubydragon.com