Quest – Make Interactive Story Games

Quest lets you make interactive story games. With Quest, you can create text adventure games like Zork and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Text adventures consist of rooms, and each room can have various objects that the player can interact with.

Alternatively, you can write gamebooks like the Choose Your Own Adventure and Fighting Fantasy books. A gamebook has pages with multiple choices that link between them.

There’s no requirement to know a programming language to write the games in this environment. All you need is a story to tell. Your game can be played anywhere.

Features include:

• Powerful yet has a shallow learning curve.
• Visual script editor. A plain English approach to programming, where you can choose commands from searchable lists, so there’s no syntax to remember.
• Highly customisable – most functionality comes from a Core library, which is written in the Quest game language (ASLX).
• Games support unlimited undo.
• HTML game output allows embedding sounds, pictures, YouTube, and Vimeo clips.
• XML game file format is easily editable outside of Quest if you don’t want to use Quest’s editor (which is Windows based – see note).
• Games are fully translatable – there is no hard coded text within a game. You can translate the English template to create games in other languages. Create games in English, French, German, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Greek, Danish, Esperanto and other languages.

Note: Sadly, there is no client for Quest available for Linux, and no prospect of any development of a native Linux client. Instead, Linux users have to make do with using the software in a web browser. Some users have reported successfully running the Windows desktop client with Wine, a compatibility layer capable of running Windows applications.

Website: textadventures.co.uk/quest
Support: Documentation, GitHub, Forum, Blog
Developer: Andy Joel (previously Alex Warren)
License: MIT License

Quest is written in C# and JavaScript. Learn C# with our recommended free books and free tutorials. Learn JavaScript with our recommended free books and free tutorials.

Return to Write Interactive Fiction Home Page

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