Author Archives: textadventurescouk

Quest 5.0.1 released

The first bug-fix release of Quest 5 is now available – download Quest 5.0.1 here.

I’m pretty pleased that nothing too major was discovered in the v5.0 release, so thanks once again to the beta testers!

Here’s what’s new and what’s fixed:

  • New feature: Players can now customise fonts and colours for a game from the new Options window.
  • New feature: Container “open” and “close” messages can be customised per container.
  • Improved: More useful error messages if Quest can’t load a game file due to an error in one of your scripts.
  • Fixed: Various issues with Quest 4 games – locked exits in CAS files, sounds in ZIP files, and timers running at the wrong time.
  • Fixed: Memory leaks in the Editor which could cause Quest to hang when switching to/from the Code View with large games.
For the full list, see the Closed Quest 5.0.1 Items on the Issue Tracker.

Using Quest to create text adventures for iPhone, iPad, Android

You can already use Quest to create text adventure games for desktop PCs and web browsers. But the big area of growth for games (and indeed software of all types) in recent years has been smartphones, and I’m pleased to report that I am making good progress in bringing Quest games to the iPhone. The way it works is a tool which I am developing to convert Quest games into pure Javascript. By taking the output of this tool and combining it with PhoneGap, it is possible to create native applications for iPhone, iPad, Android, Blackberry and more, which we can then submit to the App Stores. So far, I’ve created an iPhone UI which uses a combination of HTML and the NativeControls PhoneGap plugin for added iPhone-native slickness (there is still some way to go before pure HTML UIs are really good enough). I’m pretty happy with the results – by using Quest’s existing hyperlink support to cut down on the amount of typing required, I think I have come up with a design which makes text adventures work nicely on a mobile phone. First, here’s a screenshot showing the start of an example game. Objects and exits have hyperlinks, and there is a clearly marked textbox for typing in commands. There are tabs at the bottom of the screen for Inventory, Objects, Exits and “More”. IMG_1007 Tapping a hyperlink brings up a standard style iPhone menu. In this screenshot, we’ve just tapped the “glovebox” object link, and we see the display verbs: IMG_1008 If we tap “open”, the “open glovebox” command is inserted, complete with another hyperlink to make it easier to perform further actions on the same object. IMG_1009 Tapping the gun in the output above again gives a pop-up menu. It’s a different set of options this time- in a Quest game, each object can have its own set of “display verbs”, and I think it is especially important for the mobile phone version of a game that each object has relevant display verbs. IMG_1010 If we tap “take”, we’re now carrying the gun. If we switch to the Inventory tab, we can now see it listed. IMG_1011 If we tap the gun in the inventory, we again get a list of verbs. This time it’s Quest’s “inventory verbs” that are used, so we get a different list of relevant actions now that we’re carrying the gun. IMG_1015 The Objects tab is laid out in a similar fashion to the Inventory tab, and shows the objects in the current location. IMG_1012 The compass tab shows the familiar Quest compass, with available exits highlighted. You can tap an exit to move in that direction. You could also simply tap the exit’s hyperlink on the Game tab. IMG_1013 Images are resized to fit the screen. In this example, looking at the car triggers a script to show a picture and print a message. IMG_1014

[Car picture by skrotmumrik, CC licence]

So far, this only works on iPhone, but an obvious next step is to make the UI work nicely for iPad too – which is the perfect excuse for me to go out and buy one! Because I’m using PhoneGap, it will be straightforward to create similar apps for Android too – although the UI would need to be developed for that platform. PhoneGap also supports Blackberry, WebOS, Symbian and soon Windows Phone, so it would be possible to bring Quest games to those platforms too – although it makes more sense to focus on iOS and Android as the main ones. Let’s make it happen If we’re going to find new audiences for text adventure games, we need to make them easy to find, install, and play. Right now, App Stores are a great way of making that happen. I believe they also provide a realistic opportunity to make money from text adventure games – for the first time in years. Think of how many people are happy to buy games for their smartphone, who may never purchase software for their desktop PC. With a few tweaks to the conventional parser-based interface, I hope I’ve shown that text adventures can work well on a mobile phone. I think they’re a great fit for mobile gaming – you can play a text adventure game at your own pace, for a few minutes at a time, whenever it suits you.

Educating the next generation of software developers

[Cross-posted from my Gamasutra blog]

We are going to need vastly more programmers over the coming decades. Where are they going to come from? How can we get children started programming at an early age? I have some ideas.

With the proliferation of app stores – first on the iPhone, then Android, Mac OS X and soon Windows – it’s easier than ever for people to download games and other types of software. On the web, too, increasing access to broadband and mobile internet around the world means that developers of web apps and games have vast potential audiences, as it’s now entirely normal for most people to have web access whenever and wherever they are.

This is a huge opportunity for software developers. With more people using more software more often, one thing is clear – we are going to need a lot of programmers. The potential market is already absolutely enormous. Just imagine how big it’s going to get over the coming years – and how valuable programming skills will be.

But it is already very difficult to find good developers. HR departments and recruitment agents rarely have much of a clue about the skills required for the jobs they’re trying to fill, so they’re pretty ineffective filters – which means plenty of people who can barely program are still able to get interviews. I’ve had candidates stare pretty blankly at me when I’ve asked them reasonably basic questions – yet amazingly, in many companies, these people still get hired. There are more jobs than qualified developers out there – at least, that is my experience in London anyway, and we’re in a recession.

Making Developers

So, there is already a developer shortage, and it’s only going to get worse. How can we fill the developer gap?

To answer that, we need to know what makes someone become a developer. Many people, myself included, got started on the home computers of the 1980’s – the C64s and Acorn Electrons of the time often booted up straight into a BASIC command prompt. Programming was something that pretty much all computer users did to some extent, and it was relatively easy to get started, as the computers and languages were simple. One boy in his bedroom could create software that was of a similar quality to that which could be bought for 99p on a cassette tape down at the local newsagent. Those were the days.

Fast forward to today, and we’ve lost that. The vast majority of computer users will never go anywhere near anything resembling a programming language, so they won’t even poke around out of curiosity. Even if they wanted to, it is much harder to get started now. Where do you begin? You started up an Electron and you were presented with a very simple screen that threw you straight into programming, and there was even a book in the box called “Start Programming with the Acorn Electron”. You almost couldn’t stop yourself from programming on one of those. But today, how can you get started on a PC? You can download Visual Studio Express for free – but check out what Microsoft thinks is a friendly introduction. Just go to that page and ask yourself what somebody who has never attempted programming before is likely to make of it.

programming

One of these is easier to get started with than the other

In Schools

If it weren’t for that Electron, I doubt I would be a software developer now. I remember the IT lessons I had at school in the mid 1990’s, pre mass adoption of the web, and it was all about using Word and Excel. Very uninspiring. It doesn’t sound like much has changed since then, apart from a rebrand of the subject as “ICT” – they’re still not teaching programming.

Google’s Eric Schmidt criticised this state of affairs recently:

Schmidt said the country that invented the computer was “throwing away your great computer heritage” by failing to teach programming in schools. “I was flabbergasted to learn that today computer science isn’t even taught as standard in UK schools,” he said. “Your IT curriculum focuses on teaching how to use software, but gives no insight into how it’s made.”

Recently though, it seems the tide is beginning to change, and people are waking up to what has surely been obvious for years now – we need to get kids programming again, and we need to act now.

There are plans to pilot a programming GCSE and A-Level, but I think programming concepts could be taught even earlier. I started when I was 8 years old, and there must be plenty of kids out there who have the aptitude for it and could do the same thing. We just need to make programming accessible and appealing.

Simplified Languages

There are some simplified languages, such as Scratch and Microsoft’s SmallBasic. I think there are more creative ways to introduce programming into the curriculum though, and I think the software I have been working on, Quest, has a role to play here. Quest is designed to revive the text adventure, and I think it also has a wide variety of potential uses for education, one of which is as a way of introducing the fundamentals of programming.

Quest presents a visual editor so it doesn’t have off-putting syntax and crazy punctuation all over the place – all programming script commands are displayed in plain English. There’s no need to remember what to type, because the possible script commands can be selected from a searchable list. You can create a very simple game without using any script commands at all, so the programming side of things can be introduced gradually. Underneath is a fully featured, powerful programming language – it has all the fundamental concepts that you would expect, such as variables, functions, loops, expressions and objects.

Because it’s not a “pure” programming tool I think it could even be sneaked into other areas of the curriculum – for example, in an English creative writing lesson, pupils creating a text adventure game would be exposed to a few programming concepts, and it wouldn’t even hurt a bit.

Quest Script Editor

By playing each other’s creations over the web or a school network, that will encourage competition between pupils as to who can make the best game. From the evidence I’ve seen so far, creating games with Quest is something that school children can really get excited about – some year 7’s (11-12 year olds) were so keen they were even skipping breaks to continue working on their games.

So if you’re a teacher or parent and want to introduce your children to programming, why not give Quest a try. It is free and open source.

I still have more work to do on Quest to make it even more education-friendly. I’m currently working on version 5.1, and one of my plans is to have a “simple mode” in the Editor, to hide the more advanced features which could be distracting. I hope that this will make it even more suitable for children of primary school age. There is also work to do developing course materials for teachers and pupils – Kristian Still, an assistant head teacher in Southampton, is currently developing a Moodle course for Quest.

I’m very keen to hear from teachers who may be thinking about using Quest in the classroom, so please get in touch if you have any questions or feedback.

Improvements to textadventures.co.uk

As well as making Quest a great system to create text adventure games, I want to make textadventures.co.uk a great place to host them. It started out as the very basic “Quest Games Archive” many years ago, and has had various improvements since then – “play online” support and the addition of categories, for example.

It is already probably the most popular internet destination for people who are looking to play text adventure games – it’s usually in the first two search results on Google for “text adventures”, and with the “play online” feature just a click away for every game, I think it’s a pretty good place to upload your game if you want people to play it.

However there is still some way to go to make the site work really well for both players and authors, so I’m planning to make some more enhancements over the next few months.

Here are a few that I’ve implemented over the last few days:

Statistics

I’ve been logging “download” and “play” counts for a few months now, and these are now visible on the site. The “Top 10” section on the front page now gives you three different top 10s – you can see the top rated games as before, but you can now also see “most played” and “most downloaded”. The “most downloaded” chart includes both downloads from the website and downloads from within Quest 5.0.

When you click on a game page, you can see the download and play counts under the description.

Right now the most popular game is The Things That Go Bump In The Night, by Tim Hamilton – with 9428 online plays and 1297 downloads since 7th Feb (when I started logging), that’s not a bad reach for a text adventure, I think. It also shows how popular online play is compared to downloading games – it is now the reality that most players want something they can get started with quickly, and they’re not going to waste time downloading an interpreter first.

Editing

You can now modify a game listing after you’ve uploaded it. So if you want to update the description, or upload a new bug-fix version, you can now do so by going to your game page and clicking “Edit this game” at the top. You must be logged in of course!

Categories and Languages

Games are assigned a category only after they’ve been checked by a moderator. This ensures that only games of a reasonable quality are given a category – a lot of uploads are quick test games or are incomplete, so these get assigned to the Sandpit category instead. However, as a game author you probably know best what category you would like it to be in, so you can now specify one when you upload, and you can also suggest a new category if none of the existing ones fit.

You can also now specify a language. This isn’t really used anywhere at the moment, as currently all games on the site (with only one exception) are in English, but when we have enough non-English games I will implement language filtering so players will see only the languages they’re interested in.

Feedback

This is just the beginning of improving the site – there are a few more things on my list still to come:

  • an area on the site for libraries
  • support for “cover art”
  • private games
I’m grateful for any feedback! Any suggestions for making the site better are more than welcome.

Quest 5.0 is out now

Quest 5.0 is now available! Download it now.

A brand new system for creating text adventures

Quest 5 is more than just an upgrade from Quest 4 – it is a completely new system, rewritten from scratch. I started work on it around April 2009, and the first preview version was released in February 2010. In October 2010, I announced that the system was to be free and open source. And in April 2011, I decided to increase the pace of development – quitting my job to work on Quest full-time.

Easy to use, powerful, flexible

Compared to Quest 4, the new system is much more powerful, flexible and robust – and I believe it’s even easier to use. The standard game behaviour is written in Quest itself, which means it is completely customisable. New features include support for “undo” when playing games (and also undo/redo in the Editor), expressions, local variables, lists and dictionaries – if you used Quest 4 you’ll want to check out the Upgrade Notes.

Compared to other systems, I had several objectives. Many of these are the same objectives I’ve always had for Quest, but the rewrite has made it possible for me to finally do them properly:

  • Easy to create games. It’s easy to get started creating games with Quest 5. The visual editor is designed to be intuitive – everything is shown in plain English, and the aim is that features are easy to find by exploring the menus and tabs. You don’t need to learn programming syntax, or spend time trying to get the system to understand you. I believe that no other system is as easy to get started with.
  • Easy to play games. I would guess that the vast majority of people in the world have never played a text adventure game. Quest is designed so that new players should be able to easily figure out how to play – see my earlier blog post on Eliminating “Guess the Verb”.
  • Powerful. Behind the visual editor is a fully featured programming language. This means that although Quest is easy to learn, it doesn’t restrict what is possible. See my earlier blog post about the design of the Script Editor.
  • Modern. I believe we should try to think of text adventure games as a new format. Many people, particularly those under 30, give me a worryingly blank look when I say I’m trying to revive the text adventure – they don’t remember them in the first place. So there is no sense in trying to emulate the 1980’s. The modern text adventure must be part of the web – it must be possible to play games in a browser, and easily share links to them. Games should be able to embed anything on the web – links, pictures, sounds and YouTube videos can all be part of the modern text adventure experience. Quest games use HTML and Javascript whether they’re being played online or offline, which means they can be integrated with websites, and there is also the potential to create innovative new user interfaces for games. No other system offers this flexibility.
  • Shareable. It’s fairly pointless making games if other people don’t play them. Quest makes it easy to download and play games with its integrated game browser – there’s no need to visit a separate site, as you can easily download games directly inside the application. When you create a game and upload it to textadventures.co.uk, other people can play online in their web browser – there is no need for them to download any software, so they can play a game on Windows, Mac and Linux – even iPhone, iPad and Android, though there is still some work to be done to make the site easy to use with those devices. No other system makes it this easy for you to share your creations.
  • Flexible. Quest is fully open source, and under a fairly permissive licence (Ms-PL, which is similar to the MIT licence). This means you can use and adapt Quest for use in closed source applications, to create desktop games or to power websites. No other system lets you do this.
  • International. Quest 5 supports multiple languages. Out of the box, you can create games in English, French, German, Spanish or Dutch. Quest’s standard text comes from one file, meaning it is straightforward to create your own translation.
But don’t take my word for it, download it now and see for yourself.

This is just the beginning

There are many more things I want to add to Quest, but “shipping is also a feature” as they say – I thought it was important to get something of release quality “out there” as soon as I could. The Issue Tracker will give you some idea of what is coming up – there are currently a large number of features assigned to a future “Quest 5.1” release, though this is quite a long list at the moment so I would expect a lot of those features to be pushed back to later releases.

In addition to the features listed on the Issue Tracker, there are some other Quest projects in the pipeline:

  • Linux and OS X versions of the desktop Player (and eventually, the Editor)
  • iPhone- and iPad-friendly versions of the web Player – maybe also native applications
  • “Simple mode” for the Editor, to make it even easier (particularly for children) to create games with Quest
  • Possibly a web-based Editor
  • Improvements to the textadventures.co.uk site – better profiles, editing existing game listings, improvements to categories, easier embedding of games in other websites, game analytics (e.g. what percentage of people complete your game), non-public games (i.e. not listed in the categories but you can still share the game via a link)
  • Integration of Quest with e-learning systems such as Moodle
If you have any other suggestions please let me know!

You can help

I quit my job to make Quest but I don’t really have a business plan – my primary motivation is really just that I want the software to exist. If it brings opportunities my way, that’s marvellous (and if not, it’s all good for my CV/resumé – I’m not completely nuts). So if you have a particular project in mind, please get in touch. Maybe you’d like me to do some custom development for you? Maybe you’ve seen a feature on the Issue Tracker you would like to sponsor?

Or if you would simply like to express your gratitude, if you think this software which I am giving away is worth something, I am of course happy to accept donations too, large or small.

If you don’t want to contribute money, there are other ways to show your appreciation – get involved! Quest isn’t just “my” project any more – as it’s open source, I’m happy to accept code contributions and translations. All feedback is very useful, so please report any bugs you find using the Issue Tracker, make suggestions at Uservoice, and join in the forums. You can also email me at alex@axeuk.com or tweet me @alexwarren.

Thanks

Many thanks to everybody who has made suggestions, posted bug reports, contributed features and translations. I don’t even know some of your real names. In no particular order, thanks to Stephen Hart, Jhames, Pertex, Jonathan Dobson, ThePixie, Xordevoreaux, Lina Anna, Guillaume Poulain, and anyone else I’ve forgotten!

Keep up to date

To keep up to date:

  • Join the mailing list for release announcements
  • Follow @TextAdv on Twitter for Quest announcements and game releases
  • Follow @alexwarren on Twitter for Quest announcements and other thoughts

Download Quest 5.0 now

Quest 5.0 Release Candidate 2

Inevitably, a few bugs were logged against last week’s Release Candidate 1, so I’ve now fixed them and uploaded a new Release Candidate 2, which you can download here.

The biggest bugs fixed were that the Exits tab wasn’t showing existing exits, and a memory leak that could cause a hang after switching back and forth in the Code View after making edits. See the issue tracker list for full details.

The only thing that might remotely be called a new feature is the ability to translate the labels for the panes in the language template.

I’ll be up in Edinburgh watching comedy for the next week, which will be nice as London has descended into rioting as I type this – I’m drowning out the sound of distant sirens with some soothing music, so it will be nice to get away from it for a few days (presuming it doesn’t spread to Edinburgh too). If only we could persuade these kids to sit quietly indoors playing text adventures instead. Anyway, I’ll be checking my emails and the forums but may be slower to reply than usual.

When I get back I’ll fill in the remaining gaps in the documentation, fix any bugs that have been logged and then we’ll be ready to go!

Twitter: @alexwarren

Quest 5.0 Release Candidate 1

In the week since Beta 4 was released, 24 issues have been closed on the Issue Tracker, most of which have been relatively minor bugs. I have reached the magic zero mark again, so it’s time for the first release candidate, which you can download now.

A few minor features did make it through:

  • Quest now uses the JAWS API to speak all text aloud if you’re using the JAWS screen reader
  • It’s now easier to lock and unlock exits from a script
  • You can look in directions (contribution by Stephen Hart)
  • You can now edit “ask” and “tell” topics
  • It’s now easier to disable the object panes
  • Objects can now be cloned by a script
  • Added a function to tell if an object inherits a particular type
Being a release candidate means in theory that if no bugs are found, I won’t need to update the setup file for the final release – this could be the one. I do expect there will probably be more bugs logged over the coming week or so though, and I still need to update the documentation, so I’m not saying “this is it!” just yet – I expect that the final release will be available towards the end of August.

Quest 5.0 Beta 4 released – approaching the final release

Quest 5.0 Beta 4 is out now, and we’re on the home straight – this beta is feature complete. I’m not planning to add any new features to version 5.0 – very minor ones may be still be added, but all the outstanding feature requests have been moved to a planned future version 5.1 release (they may be rescheduled again of course).

I will still accept contributions of new/updated translations and minor additions to the Core library – I know a few people may currently be working on these. The project is still hosted on CodePlex but recently switched from SVN to Mercurial hosting, which will make it much easier for people to work on their own forks and for me to manage contributions.

New in Beta 4: Some improvements to the parser, re-implementing features that existed in Quest 4.x but hadn’t yet found their way into 5.0:

  • you can now refer to objects in the previous command by article or gender, e.g. “it”. So you can type “look at box”, “take it”, “open it” etc. Multiple objects are handled via the usual disambiguation menu – so you can type “put book on shelf”, then “look at it” will let you choose between “book” and “shelf”.
  • if you make a mistake while typing an object name, you can now use “oops” to correct it. For example, “look at bok”, “oops book”. This can even handle multiple objects and a whole sequence of mistakes, so if you’re an especially poor typist you can end up with sequences like this:
> put bok on shulf
I can't see that. (bok)

> oops bik
I can't see that. (bik)

> oops book
I can't see that. (shulf)

> oops sholf
I can't see that. (sholf)

> oops shelf
You put the book on the shelf.

If you don’t like “oops” you can of course still press the up arrow to correct the previous command (or just type more carefully in the first place!). Even though it may not be an especially useful feature, I was pleased that I was able to implement it entirely with changes to the Core library – I think this shows how flexible Quest is, as you could implement your own entirely customised parser in a game if you wanted, and it would work without requiring any software updates.

There have also been some improvements to help with creating non-English games:

  • directions can now have default prefixes – there are three different sets, one for compass directions (N/S/E/W/NE/etc.), one for up/down and one for in/out. These are all blank for English games, but may be useful for other languages.
  • language templates can now add object types, for example for masculine and feminine inanimate objects.
  • when adding a verb, the language template can now define a default expression which can include object attributes. In previous betas this was a hard-coded string. Now, for English the default verb expression is:
"You can't #verb# " + object.article + "."

So if you add a verb “smash”, you get sensible default responses “You can’t smash it”, “You can’t smash them” etc.

Other new features in Beta 4:

  • Record a walkthrough while playing the game – on the walkthrough editor, click the “Record” button. Play your game and all steps will be recorded, which is great for testing. If you click “Record” on an existing walkthrough, it will play through and you can then append more steps.
  • Add external links to a game, so you can link back to your own website or email address.
  • There is a new “in” direction (which has meant a slight redesign of the compass rose).
  • You can now run scripts after taking, dropping, opening, closing, locking, unlocking, switching on, switching off an object, so you don’t need to override any built-in behaviour if you just want to play a sound, show a picture, release a herd of wildebeest or whatever in response to the player doing one of these “standard” things to an object.
  • Finally fixed a long-standing design flaw with verbs in Quest, in that it was easy to override and therefore break default functionality. I’ve lost count of the number of times people have asked for help because the “take” command had suddenly stopped working, and it was because they had added “take” as a custom verb instead of using the Inventory tab. The editor now prevents you from adding a verb to an object that would clash with an existing command, and gives you guidance on where you should go to put that script or message instead.

You can download the new version here: http://quest5.net/downloads/quest500beta4.exe

Get those bug reports in! The next release will be a Release Candidate, probably in a couple of weeks. All being well, we should go “gold”/RTM around late August.

In the meantime I need to complete the documentation, one of my least favourite tasks!

Teaching with text adventures

The “retro” aspect of text adventure games is kind of fun, but I think it can also be limiting. I think there is a lot of potential for text adventure games to have a broader appeal, with wider uses, way beyond harking back to old-skool computer games. There is a place for text adventures on the modern web, but not simply “hey, remember those old games from the 1980’s? Some people are still making them!”

I am guilty of this kind of pigeon-holing myself of course. The current introduction on the Quest website says “Quest brings 1980’s-style text adventure games up to date” – well, fine, yes, maybe it does, but when I rewrite that introduction for Quest 5.0, I don’t want to frame it in those terms.

This is because I want to introduce this type of game to a new generation of authors and players, and these people may not even “remember” text adventure games in the first place. In fact, the most important people who I want to introduce to text adventures certainly won’t remember them – anybody at school today will have been born after 1993, a long time after text adventures ceased to have a mainstream appeal.

Using Quest in Education

There are educational uses for Quest, both in getting students to play text adventure games, and in getting them to write their own. There are probably ways of using Quest in any subject that touches on problem solving, reading, or creative writing:

  • Quest could be used as an introduction to programming – all the standard programming concepts are in there: variables, functions, expressions, objects, loops.
  • For teaching creative writing, Quest makes the author think of multiple points of view – the “reader” will be interacting with the game world.
  • Teaching foreign languages – getting students to play a game in a language that is not their mother tongue challenges them in both reading and writing, and it ensures comprehension, as they can’t progress in the game unless they can read and write sentences correctly.

To children, text adventures are not old-fashioned – they’ll likely have never played anything like them before, so it will be new to them. This could be a challenge, in that they’ll be unaware of the conventions around the kinds of things they can type – but I think that Quest’s hyperlink support can help them to get the idea quickly.

Current users

I am very keen to hear from any teachers who are either currently using Quest in the classroom, or who may be thinking about doing so.

In the last month or so I have heard from:

As well as secondary schools, I have also heard from a university professor considering creating a final year project using Quest. There should be applications at the younger end of the spectrum as well – simpler text adventure games for primary school pupils.

In fact I don’t see any reason why primary school pupils wouldn’t be able to create games as well. I may need to work on a “simple mode” for the Quest editor, but if I can introduce young children to programming, that will be a great thing. I myself started programming on an Acorn Electron using BBC BASIC at the age of 8, and it would be fantastic if Quest could be used to get today’s 8 year-olds into programming too.

Deployment and Assessment

Quest features the ability to distribute games over web, so players don’t need to install any software. You can either upload games to textadventures.co.uk, or if you have a Windows server, you can install the Quest WebPlayer component. This means that it’s simple to deploy a game – whether you want students to play over a school network, or on their home computers, iPads etc., there’s no software to install on the end-user machine – all you need to do is give them a web link.

In the near future I want to look at enabling ways of integrating Quest with systems such as Moodle. The idea being that you could get students to play a game, and assess any aspect of the game session in the external e-Learning system – that could be simply whether or not they completed the game, or it could be any attribute such as the score, the number of rooms visited, or a full transcript of the game session. Unlike other “play online” systems (such as Parchment for Inform), Quest runs the game on the server, not the client – so it should be easier to implement such monitoring features by creating an API that can transmit details of the game session somewhere else.

Feedback

I’m very keen for any feedback on this, as this is a new area for me. If you’re thinking about using Quest in the classroom, I’d love to hear from you – what are your ideas, and what can I do to help?

You can get in touch by leaving a comment here, emailing me at alex@axeuk.com, or you can find me on Twitter at @alexwarren.

Quest 5.0 Beta 3 and Tutorial available

Quest 5.0 Beta 3 is now available for download.

The first draft of the Quest 5.0 Tutorial is also now available.

We are getting closer to the final 5.0 release now. The Issue Tracker currently only has a few relatively minor features assigned to a future Beta 4 release, so what we have now is close to the final version 5.0. Of course, version 5.0 is just the beginning – a rebirth for Quest, really – and I have lots of ideas for the versions that will come afterwards. But I think it is important now to get the new system stable and “out there”, so I don’t expect that there will be too many dramatic changes before the “gold” or “RTM” version 5.0.

New features in Beta 3:

  • Status Attributes – these are the equivalent of Status Variables in Quest 4, and let you display attributes (such as player health, money) in the pane on the right of the screen.
  • Multi-object commands – “take all” and “drop all” are now implemented by the Core library.
  • Ask/Tell – you can now give characters a list of subjects that the player can ask or tell them about.
  • Lockable containers – you can now assign a “key” object to a container which the player must have before they can unlock or open the container
  • Compass exit editor – more easily create exits between rooms, including automatically creating exits in the other direction. Hyperlinks in the exit editor allow you to navigate between rooms.
  • Play YouTube and Vimeo videos – now built-in to the Core library.
  • Switchable objects – easily implement objects which can be switched on and off.
  • Object Types can now extend string lists – this is used so that multiple types can contribute to the display verbs list. For example, if an object is both a container and switchable, the display verbs list shown when the player clicks its hyperlink will include “open”, “close” as well as “switch on”, “switch off”.
  • Player object is now shown in the editor – easier to set the start location, set up attributes, and set up the player’s initial inventory.
  • Editor now watches file for external changes – so you can more easily make edits using an external text editor while the file is still open in Quest.

This release also fixes all bugs which have been logged so far – 45 items since Beta 2, according to the Issue Tracker. Many thanks to everybody who has been logging bugs so far. Please keep them coming!

Download Quest 5.0 Beta 3