I was playing around with different interactive fiction engines for the web and wasn’t quite happy with any of them, so I made a new one!
Jumbo Grove is a game engine in the style of Undum/Racounteur and Salet. Its main feature? It has great documentation! It has complete API docs, a comprehensive guide, and many live examples. You can get started in less than 30 seconds by remixing this project on Glitch.
But also:
- It doesn’t assume you want to use CoffeeScript. All the examples are in plain JS.
- It’s geared toward people with beginner-level experience with JS, but has a lot to offer more advanced programmers
- Uses Markdown and Nunjucks for string templates, the least confusing JS template language
- Supports desktop, mobile, & gamepads.
It’s at version 0.2 right now, but only because it hasn’t been battle-tested by a lot of people. I used it to make my unfinished Ludum Dare game and made a lot of improvements while writing the guides, but I don’t want to call it 1.0 until someone besides me has taken it for a spin.
Please let me know what you think!