Is there a database of available game engines?

I am getting ready for National Novel Writing Month and I decide to create a piece of Interactive Fiction/CYOA. Then I had to decide what engine I wanted to write it in. Twine, Ren’py, Inform, Undum, …

I thought: It would be great if there was a repository of IF engines where I could filter by my requirements.

But before I went off and created one of my own, I thought it would be prudent to ask if such a thing existed.

So, that being said, does there exist a filterable list of IF engines?

Susan

No; the closest is Roger Firth’s Cloak of Darkness page, ifwiki.org/index.php/Category:Authoring_system .

If you did build a DB it would be handy to include a reference to those sites though. Maybe link back to the wiki for each system?

“Cloak of Darkness” is focussed on parser-based IF – that’s what it was designed to showcase.

The wiki is more general, more complete, and can be updated. But it’s a bare link dump and hard to browse. I guess what you really want is a list that mentions how actively the system is supported and how widely it’s used.

So thinks we would want

  • link to website
  • link to IFWiki
  • last updated/current version

Stuff to filter by:

  • Parser/CYOA/Visual Novel
  • coding platforms
  • target platforms
  • coding language

Anything else you can think of?

Susan

Is web play possible?
Supported in Gargoyle?
Programming paradigms
IF features:
for both: multimedia
for choice based: state/variable tracking, in place text changes
for parser based: easy of changing library messages, disambiguation control, changing the names of things during play, conversation models

For reference here’s some related previous discussion: https://intfiction.org/t/help-me-make-a-what-system-should-i-use-resource/3794/1

I would think something like this actually belongs on ifwiki.

I think the wiki is good as a backing store of information but interface wise you can do a lot better than Mediawiki.

I’ll put something together this weekend.

Susan

If possible, it might also be helpful to include screenshots of some representative pieces in each format, to help prospective authors get an idea of what the output can look like.

Did anything ever come of this?