A minimal tool to create text adventures
Yesterday I published the very first version of a minimal tool to create and publish text adventures. It’s called gist-txt and you can find the source code at https://github.com/potomak/gist-txt.
The inspiration for this project came from two software projects:
- Twine (http://twinery.org/), an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories
- bl.ocks.org (http://bl.ocks.org/), a simple viewer for code examples hosted on GitHub Gist
The tool’s features are very limited. What it does is basically reading GitHub
public gists and handle links to browse between files of the gist (scenes in
gist-txt’s vocabulary). The cool part is that you can create your text adventure
simply by creating a new gist. This lets you easily share and track updates of
your work (gists are backed by git repositories). Another cool part of this tool
is that the hosting is as simple as a specially crafted URL. Just share an URL
in the form http://potomak.github.io/gist-txt/#<your-gist-id> to let people
play your game.
I made simple example gist at https://gist.github.com/potomak/acebd8fe14942fab4e8e, that can be shared as a text adventure with the link http://potomak.github.io/gist-txt/#acebd8fe14942fab4e8e.
Update 03/16/2015: I published a new post about some new features.