Gamefic is an open-source adventure game engine developed in Ruby. This week I published the first demo, The Master Tape. Today I released version 0.1.1 of the engine, which includes some important updates.
The repo is available at http://github.com/castwide/gamefic.
How to Install
If you have Ruby, you can gem install gamefic.
So far I’ve tested it on CentOS using Ruby 1.8.7 and 2.0.0, and on Windows 7 using Ruby 1.9.3. Any version of Linux should handle it. The only platform issue I’ve encountered is with JRuby, which doesn’t support $SAFE levels.
How to Play
- Download the demo game at gamefic.com/the-master-tape.gfic
- Run it from the command line: gamefic the-master-tape.gfic
Making Games
Gamefic also provides commands for developing games and making distributable game files. The repo’s README has instructions and examples to help you get started. If you’d like to see the code for The Master Tape, you can download a zip of the source.
Things to Do
- More documentation and examples.
- A desktop client with graphical support.
- A mobile-friendly version of the web client.
- Save/restore/undo commands.
- Lots and lots of testing and debugging!
Plans for the Future
I’m also working on libraries for real-time games, 2d graphics, and networked multiplayer. This will make it possible to use Gamefic for MUDs and graphical RPGs.
Questions, comments, and feedback are appreciated.