Squiffy – Write Interactive Fiction

Squiffy is an open source tool for creating multiple choice interactive fiction stories. These games focus on text and story. Players navigate through the game or story by clicking links.

This game genre is sometimes known as gamebooks or choose your own adventure books (CYOA).

Squiffy works in a web browser. There is also a graphical client available for Linux (OS X and Windows are supported too).

Alternatively, you can simply use any text editor to create the text and compile the games with Squiffy’s own command-line version.

Features include:

• Very easy to use.
• Creates HTML, CSS and JavaScript files.
• Format text using plain text, Markdown (a lightweight markup language with plain text formatting syntax), and HTML.
• Two types of text block:
  • Sections – the main units of text.
  • Passages – smaller units which exist within sections.
• Trigger a passage after the player has made a certain number of clicks within a section.
• Embed text from another section, or from a passage in the current section.
• Track the sections and passages a player has seen.
• Create labels which replace existing output when a link is clicked or when a section or passage is displayed.
• Squiffy Editor:
  • Syntax highlighting.
  • Configurable font size.
  • Collapse sections and passages.
  • Add section/passage buttons.
  • Undo and redo.
  • Searchable section/passage dropdowns.
  • Supports Unicode.
  • Development tools option.

Website: textadventures.co.uk/squiffy
Support: Documentation, GitHub (Compiler), GitHub (Squiffy Editor), Forum
Developer: Luis Felipe Morales Bendicho, Alex Warren
License: MIT License

Squiffy is written entirely in JavaScript – the compiler uses Node.js and the games it generates run in a web browser. Learn JavaScript with our recommended free books and free tutorials.

There are binaries of Squiffy editor for Linux and Windows. It uses the GTK+ cross-platform widget toolkit. At the time of writing, the latest version of Squiffy editor is 5.1.2.

The screenshot below shows the Squiffy editor with the DevTools option enabled.

Learn JavaScript with our recommended free books and free tutorials.

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