The ALAN Adventure Language is a programming system for writing and playing text adventure games, interactive fiction, text-based simulations for teaching or other similar types of interactive software. It aims to make writing interactive fiction as easy as possible and requires an author to have only basic programming skills.
Alan consists of a special purpose, application-oriented programming language and a set of tools to support working in that language to create games. The tools include a compiler, various flavours of runners/interpreters, a completely integrated development environment (IDE), a map generator and more.
The Alan computer language tries to retain a natural language look, so doesn’t use typical programming constructs such as brackets or other complicated visual punctuation. It aims to make it simple to do common things, but retain the option of creating complicated things with complex constructs. Compared to programming in a typical programming language, the Alan system handles most of the mundane tasks and supplies sensible settings so that you can concentrate on the plot, the puzzles, the objects and the map. This makes Alan a true high-level computer language.
Features of the language include:
- Easy to learn.
- Constructs that are natural to an author of Interactive Fiction reflecting the various concepts encountered when creating an adventure plot.
- Takes a descriptive view of the concepts of adventure authoring.
- Strictly typed, compiled, object-oriented language with single inheritance.
- No explicit type declarations, except for instances of classes; instead, types are automatically inferred from expressions such as integers, strings or instances of a particular class.
Website: www.alanif.se
Support: Documentation, Blog
Developer: Thomas Nilsson
License: Artistic License 2.0
ALAN is written in C. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Return to Write Interactive Fiction Home Page
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