Fatewright is an open-soure project (written in Java) to facilitate the creation of custom text-based story games, such as gamebooks, CYOA games or other kinds of non-parser interactive fiction texts.
This is currently a work in progress and I will begin pushing the source code once it is reasonably stable.
Neither this README nor the Quick Guide is complete yet.
I am currently mostly working on a game (currently private) which uses a makeshift version of Fatewright, so that is my main focus right now.
- Quick Guide
- Full Documentation
- Forum
- My Game (made with Fatewright) (currently private)
Fatewright relies on a concept of pages and a playthrough file. Each player decision or turn of events leads to a new page in the story.
A page is essentially a text file with a .fwpg extension which contains the story text, along with some very simple scripts to tell the engine what to do when. For example, the player may be shown a certain passage from the page only if the player character passes a skillcheck, or if they have a certain item in their possession, and so on. You don't need to know any coding to write the scripts, see the Quick Guide for more info. One more page file is used to dynamically store the displayed text from the last read page so that it can be displayed again without executing the scripts from the original page.
Other than the page files, Fatewright needs a playthrough file, which is another text file, but with .fwsv extension, which may (but does not have to) contain several sections for playthrough information. Each of these sections is optional, and may remain unused, depending on the kind of game the author wants to create.
Since .fwpg and .fwsv are text files, they can be potentially read or edited manually by the player, which may be undesirable. This is why, I have plans to include a way for the author to optionally cipher the files. However, this may not be foolproof because Fatewright is open-source. This is meant more as a deterrent for potential cheaters because it would be more fun to just play the game than to decipher it manually. But of course, an author may also choose to modify the code to their liking for the purposes of protecting the game information from manual viewing or editing.
Quick backstory
In my final year of college, I started making a text adventure game called Zenerian Chronicles. There were tools to help with this, but since at that time I was not aware of any such tools which gave me complete control over the game mechanics, I decided to build the game from scratch using my very limited Java knowledge. As I was writing the code for what would basically be the engine for my game, I realised that to give myself some freedom in the future, I was making the engine somewhat independent of the story. This meant that others could use my engine to turn their own stories into interactive text games. And thus, Fatewright was born.