SLAY2

Monkey Archive Forums/Monkey Projects/SLAY2

Sledge(Posted 2012) [#1]
An interactive fiction "engine" for multi-choice games. I put engine in quote marks because it's more of a back-end -- the original SLAY used Lua game files but for SLAY2 games are written in Monkey source and compiled along with the app. Nowhere near complete (there's a fuller version written with PhoneGap so a lot of the busywork is replicating features that HTML5 gives you for free) but you can certainly check out the current work in progress build if you're so-inclined :)


c.k.(Posted 2012) [#2]
Oooooh! That's an unfamiliar niche to me. Are there a lot of interactive fiction apps out there right now? Remember "Choose Your Own Adventure?" Of course you do! :-)


Sledge(Posted 2012) [#3]
Some of the Fighting Fantasy / Sorcery books have made an appearance in the AppStore. As examples of the form I think they're somewhat hamstrung by having to be pretend-books but as pretend-books (which is doubtless what their fans expect) they seem pretty good.

There's also a few outfits releasing games on the various stores (Choice Of Games for example) along with the occasional hybrid like ZDay.

I'm really trying to shift over to a genre that I can complete in a timely fashion and to which I can maybe make a bit of a contribution. I also want to avoid another project like BlastOff!, where I spent the vast majority of the development time adding functionality to the detriment of adding content (there's no meta-game in BlastOff! and it probably needed one). Once the engine bit is solid I should be able to concentrate on content without having to trouble myself with it again, particularly as it's a narrative-based form.


AdamRedwoods(Posted 2012) [#4]
how does the slay2 engine make things easier? do you have a small coding snippet?
just curious.


Sledge(Posted 2012) [#5]
A definite element of it is re-usability, of separating the engine bit from the "gamefiles" folder, and of having the engine know how the serialize anything the game-files declare so that state saving and restoration are automatic (which hasn't made if from the PhoneGap to the Monkey version just yet -- I want to formalize a few more things first).

The test game is a single (game)file and the source for it is:


Now you might find the way content is built horrendous, and I'd forgive you, but personally I find that I'm really quite productive with it :D Everything that is added to a location is done so through strictly defined units (a Paragraph or an Option or, eventually, an image etc) while the logic to determine exactly what gets added can be expressed in lovely, lovely Monkey syntax (because if I'm honest I was never particularly enamoured with Lua).

I'm really aiming for a system that supports complex world-states and a high degree of variation with a simple interface for the user.