Worldsmith released!

Eek. Scary.

Worldsmith is available as a browser game on itch.io

I’ve released two versions. A free version of Chapter one: interactivefables.itch.io/worldsmith-online

and the full version for $5.99 : interactivefables.itch.io/worldsmith

I hope you’ll give it a try!

Ade.

So, I’d just like to shill for this; I wasn’t involved in Worldsmith’s production, but I saw a copy right at the end, and I think it’s really significant for the community, besides just being a good game.

Like we discussed in an earlier thread, there have been several games that included game-cued graphics, sound and video; my favorites being Future Boy!, Guilded Youth, and The Shadow of the Cathedral (although I just played the text version there). I think that Worldsmith is worth investigating because it solves the web-parser interaction in a way that lets you use the full power of javascript.

It has its drawbacks of course, most importantly that is makes regular interpreter play unfeasible. But I think it’s something people should check out.

As a player, I really like the game. The world-building interaction reminds me of Sim Earth or a bit like ActRaiser. Why am I shilling for this game? It’s because I think those games I mentioned earlier (by General Coffee productions, TextFyre, and Juhana/Jim Munroe) really deserved more attention, especially the commercial ones, and I don’t want another great commercial game with nice production values fall by the wayside.

So anyway, I recommend trying the free version; it will give you a good idea of what the engine can do. Of course the full story has more to offer, and I believe in supporting independent artists, but what the first chapter has is very substantial.

I too would like to promote this story. It’s an interesting system-based story and very science-centric. I haven’t played it through, but I’ve played enough of it to know it’s well done.

On a side note, I made an attempt to get fyrevm-web ready to enable the web interactions for this story, but two problems surfaced. glulx-typescript still needs performance tuning. This story had some serious lag points (in glulx-typescript) in it that were not workable from a release-to-public perspective. Second, fyrevm-web needs a “standard interpreter” implementation that has yet to be constructed. On the surface this seems simple, it’s just a scrolling window right? But that scrolling window made up of turn-based output is different enough to give my limited HTML/CSS skills a headache. It’s not rocket-science. It’s just tedious work that I haven’t had time for yet.

But eventually the performance tuning will be implemented and the standard UI will be implemented and then fyrevm-web will offer integrated JavaScript machinations similar to Worldsmith.

To me, that’s the really exciting part about Worldsmith. That he’s enabled a modulated UI based on story progress. I personally would like to see more of this.

I agree, it’s of great interest to me too.