HTML5 and CSS3 based "Choose Your Own Adventure" framework

[Telarus]

http://undum.com/games/tutorial.en.html





I think this forum could have a lot of fun with this.

[Triple Zero]

That looks really good! Especially the parchment paper background texture does a lot, of course

It's a bit buggy in Opera, but here's the source:

https://github.com/idmillington/undum

If anyone makes a pretty game with it I could probably fix the cross browser bugs.

More info from the readme:

Undum is a game framework for building a sophisticated form of hypertext interactive fiction.

If that means nothing to you, then let's go back a few steps. Remember those Choose Your Own Adventure, or Fighting Fantasy books? Where you got to choose what your character does next? Well if you think of that in a web-page you have hypertext interactive fiction, or HIF. Instead of turning to a particular page, you click a link, and the next bit of content appears.

The problem is that those kinds of games are pretty limited. Every time the player does something, the story could go in different directions. So the author has to either write masses of branches, or else the decisions you make as a player have to be relatively short lived. If you played CYOA books you'll know that the wrong move either ended the story pretty quickly, or else it didn't really matter what you did because you'd end up at the same place.

To beat this limitation, Undum allows you to make the output dynamic. It allows you to keep track of what has happened to the character (any kinds of data, in fact), and to then change the text that gets output accordingly. Effectively it is like writing a CYOA page that is different each time you read it. This allows for far richer and more rewarding game design.

Undum is a pure client client-side library. It consists of a HTML file and three Javascript files. The HTML file uses a nice bit of styling, so there's a bunch of CSS and images in the default package too, but that can be replaced if you want. To create your own game, you edit the HTML file a little (mainly just changing the title and author), and edit one of the Javascript files.

Because the game is written in Javascript, you get the full power of a dynamic and efficient programming language. This isn't a CYOA scripting system with limited functionality. You can take control of anything you want. Or you can just keep things simple using a bunch of simple functions provided by Undum.

[minuspace]

Why am I so interested in this?

[Don Coyote]

Awesome.

[Arim the Backwards One]

This looks great.