What is it?

Scribe is a development system, which will allow you to create your own Interactive Fiction games (games such as the popular 'Zork' series, Leather Goddess of Phobos, etc). Your game will consist of a virtual world in which the players will explore and items they will find and interact with. As the author, you will design this world, and decide what the player must do in order to solve the game, as well as other events which may or may not affect the world, items, or other events. If you're not sure what Interactive Fiction games are, you can play some of the most popular ones in our Interactive Fiction section.

The Main Menu:

The Main Menu gives you access to all the different tools needed to design your new adventure:

• Basic Information: Allows you to set basic details of your game: The name of your new game, the author (you!), the introduction to your new game, as well as specifying how many items your player can carry at once, how many items they're able to wear at once, and how many items (total) can be worn and carried at a single time.
• Edit Locations: Is where you will create the different areas of your new world.
• Edit Movement Map: Where you'll decide how the different areas are interconnected-- How they get from one place to another.
• Edit Items: This is where you'll create the different items that will be in your new game.
• Game Messages: Where you'll enter the pre-programmed game messages your players will encounter throughout their adventure.
• Numeric Variables: Numeric variables will keep track of different things behind the scenes. This is where you'll define what variables your game will use, and what their starting values will be.
• True/False Variables: Much like the Numeric Variables, except these will hold only one of two values- TRUE or FALSE (much like ON and OFF).
• Player Actions: Player Actions are special events your players may do throughout your game. Along with the variables, this provides a majority of the "brains" for your new game. An example would be something like "READ BOOK", "OPEN BOX", etc.
• Automatic Actions: These are similar to the Player Actions, but are executed without the player's invoking them directly. An example would be if your player were using a lit torch, and it began raining (by another automatic action), the rain would extinguish the torch leaving the player in the dark.
• Vocabulary: Where you may review and edit the key words that will be recognized by your game. You can also add synonyms for words so that they're interchangable in the game (such as "GET" and "TAKE", for example)
• Test Adventure: What good is all that development if you can't try out your new masterpiece?
• Save Adventure: You should periodically save your work, so that you don't accidentally lose what you've accomplished so far. For those interested, the Interactive Fiction Author also supports "Developer Groups", so that everyone in a group can save/load files between one another, and essentially work together on a single adventure!
• Load Adventure: Loads a previously saved game file.

Text Formatting: Using different fonts, colors, centering, and horizontal lines

(Examples, Walkthroughs, and Tutorials coming soon!)

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