shenniger / textlang

Toolkit for writing interactive fiction (CLI + web)

This is a toolkit for creating classic text adventures. Its core is a library written with modern C++ which defines a representation for verbs, objects and actions and which parses a text adventure DSL. It also contains CLI programs both for translating between the binary representation and the DSL as well as for playing these adventures.

Finally, the repository also contains an experimental web player using WebAssembly/Emscripten and some hand-written HTML/CSS/Javascript.

It allows you to write text adventures in an efficient-to-write, easy-to-read language, have them translated to a binary and publish them as browser games.

See the example.ta file for an example.

To-Do

• Reduce code size, especially that of the WebAssembly.
• Improve comment and whitespace handling.
• Improve compiling on Windows.

How to use

1. Compile the CLI programs using ./compilecli.sh g++ (or ./compilecli.sh clang++ respectively).
2. Compile your text adventure using TextLangCompiler.build [YOUR FILE] test.
3. Use TextLangPlayer.build to try it out.
4. Compile the web player using ./compilejs.sh and store your test file (created above) in the Build/html directory.
5. Now publish your Build/html directory and point a browser to it.