Programmed Adventure Editor

[Shadekeep]

I've been working for a while now on a web-based editor for programmed/solo adventures called Dmorte. It's ready to try now if anyone is looking for a tool to help them build such things. It can also be used for pick-your-path books. It lets you visually lay out the flow of your adventure and connect up the paragraphs. It will also generate the finished random text of the whole adventure with numbered paragraphs. You can try it out here:

http://shadekeep.com/dmorte.html

It's a bit complex, so hopefully the documentation will help. I'll probably also create a walkthru video at some point showing the basics of how to build your own adventure. The program starts with a demo adventure that you can study and tinker with as well, to help learn the program. Let me know if you have any questions about it.

[FireHorse]

I favor programmed adventures, so this looks very useful. Danke!

[Chris Goodwin]

I've got a feature request already... :)

How about a way to share and play through other people's adventures? :)

(Oh, and can I suggest we nominate Shadekeep for some kind of award?)

[malchidael]

All the award I can give, but awesome job!

[Shadekeep]

Originally Posted by malchidael

All the award I can give, but awesome job!

A major award at last! :D

[JLV]

Shadekeep, you continue to amaze! Thanks for sharing this!

(Oh, and an award of some sort definitely seems to be in order! Maybe he should be nominated at Origins for something!)

[Shadekeep]

It bears reposting in this thread that SJ wrote an excellent article on creating solo adventures, posted here:

https://thefantasytrip.game/news/201...olo-adventure/

Useful reading before you begin, and part of the inspiration behind Dmorte. Especially by fanning the desire to take the drudgery out of numbering and randomising paragraphs.

[Shadekeep]

Originally Posted by Chris Goodwin

How about a way to share and play through other people's adventures? :)

Do you mean directly through the site? Like a way to post and share created adventures on shadekeep.com? If so, there are a couple concerns for me regarding that.

One is that adding an upload mechanism introduces a possible security hole, though I could probably do it through a mechanism inside the program that would be less obvious and exploitable than the typical web upload form.

The second concern is that I'd have to "police" the contents of the posted adventures for copyright infringing material, libelous and slanderous content, hate speech, etc. There are new laws, most recently those just passed in the EU, that shift a lot of the culpability onto the site owner/manager, rather than just on the person doing the posting. So that's a bit more work than I want to add to my current workload. ^_^

Still, you should be able to share your adventures pretty easily through your own distribution channels. In their most basic form they are a simple text file, so you could even just email them out. I admit that it's not as nice as having a central location like the Dmorte homepage, but it is simpler in the end.

Anyway, I hope you find the program useful, and thanks for the nice comments!

[Chris Goodwin]

Originally Posted by Shadekeep

Do you mean directly through the site? Like a way to post and share created adventures on shadekeep.com? If so, there are a couple concerns for me regarding that.

That was my first thought, but how about as HTML? Turn each "Go to [entry]" into a hyperlink whose target is another node.

Just spitballing.

[Shadekeep]

Originally Posted by ParadoxGames

This is awesome! I'm considering writing my first one of these so the timing is perfect. With the help of the TFT Discord group, we put together a list of TFT-related links. I'd like to add this to the PDF file.

Be my guest! I need to drop in on the Discord more often, too.

Originally Posted by Chris Goodwin

That was my first thought, but how about as HTML? Turn each "Go to [entry]" into a hyperlink whose target is another node.

That was actually my original plan for the program. It was going to be more of a straight web-forms thing written in PHP that would kick out a linked HTML file. It was once I got into developing Shamat that I realised I could do a more graphical application. But HTML output is still a good idea, so I think I'll circle back on that as an option too. Cheers!