Previously I announced a little Lua and C++ based text adventure engine I created and published on GitHub, freely available and playable. I intend on using it to figure out some technical problems with the Nth Society engine planning.
That link again is: https://github.com/thrize/textadv-engine
I've ported the C++ bindings to Javascript and integrated it with Node.js, my favorite way to run Javascript locally and as web apps. It wasn't too hard, the Lua library I found for it turns out to be excellent, though missing a few features.
As a result there are now three engines, all which use the same Lua game scripts:
- C++ console engine
- Node.js console engine
- Electron app engine
The most fun one is of course the Electron app engine because it's an actual app with GUI. Electron is a great framework for Node.js that allows the easy creation of desktop apps from Node.js code. I also use the Phototon UI toolkit.
^^^ You might notice the "Text to speech enabled" checkbox? Check it and see if it works for you 😉 You'll need to have the say command installed though.
The directory structure in the project now looks like this:
textadv-engine
|-img
|-lib-js
|-src-c++
|-src-electron
|---config
|---e2e
|---fonts
|---scripts
|---src
|-----helpers
|-----menu
|-----stylesheets
|---tasks
|-src-node-js
|-testgame
The three directories starting with src- hold the source for the various engines, and the instructions are easy to follow on the readme of the GitHub repo.
Please try it out and let me know what you think!
