How can I download an executable for Gargoyle for windows?

I tried downloading the source, but my computer doesn’t recognize the ‘jam’ command. I tried download FT Jam, but it won’t run on my computer.

How can I just download Gargoyle?

Where are you looking?

ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archive … goyle.html
github.com/garglk/garglk/releases

I went to this page:

https://github.com/garglk/garglk

but I couldn’t find the link to go to Releases. I’ve had this trouble with other Github projects; how do you find Releases in general?

It’s in the top bar on every project page:

638 commits 1 branch 6 releases 13 contributors

This does raise an issue I’ve brought up before - that it’s surprisingly difficult to find Gargoyle releases unless you know exactly where to look. Most people coming through GitHub or CcXvII will end up staring at a list of source files, confused, or maybe clicking the most obvious download button (“Clone or download”), which doesn’t actually give them what they want.

The situation is slightly better now that Chris has added a link to the release page in README.md, but as any web designer can tell you, very few people actually read all the text on a page. My suggestion might be to add a link to the releases page in the project description at the top of the page, e.g.:

Maybe very few people actually read all the text on the page, but very few people play text adventures.

True; but the fact that we occasionally get threads like this proves that there are, in fact, people who want to play text adventures but are confused by the Gargoyle download process (badly enough to post a thread asking for help!)

With such a niche community, any small barrier to new players is a bad thing. Putting a link in the description (or something similar) would be trivial and might help out a few people who would otherwise be confused and give up.

The link in the description would literally be immediately above the link to the releases page.

Maybe the issue is that it’s called “releases” rather than “downloads”. Unfortunately Github doesn’t give you a way to change that.

More helpful (probably) would be for the ccxvii.net/gargoyle/ page to link directly to the releases page.

I am not a regular Github user, and I am frequently confused when people want me to download from there. I’ve downloaded whole zip folders full of files with a weird extension that does nothing. I can usually figure it out, but I’m a little more persistent. However, even I have eventually got to the point of “heck with it, if you can’t take the time to give me an install file or an exe or a gblorb or an html that I don’t have to fool with then I don’t have time to play your wretched game.”

I’d venture a guess that many people never even see the “Releases” button. They just read the first button on the bar (“639 commits” - irrelevant gibberish to most people) and subconsciously assume the rest of the bar doesn’t contain anything useful.

At the very least, it’s hard to see how adding a link to the description would hurt. Links in the description are fairly common on GitHub.