Posted June 11, 2023 by Liana
#narrat #game engine #interactive fiction #narrative #html5 #gamedev
I haven't posted about Narrat updates here in a while, so here's a news update with a quick non-exhaustive description of the most important new things in recent Narrat versions (2.14.0 as of today!)
If you're new to narrat, feel free to visit the website or get started making a game
This one comes with support for `elseif` syntax. No more annoying nesting of lots of if else for convoluted logic
2.12.0 came with support for achievements and global save data. The global save data can be accessed by game scripts to allow mechanics that persist across playthrough (think Undertale shenanigans).
Relevant tweets: 2.10.0 announcement, 2.10.3 announcement, and a feature to try the engine in your browser
Screen objects allow dynamically placing sprites and texts in a scene graph on screen, which enables more flexibility to display custom elements or UI compared to the simple buttons system.
Custom start menu buttons allows adding extra buttons to the start menu that can do custom actions to extend and customise the main menu
Narrat 2.9.0 added array support with dynamic indexing, which opened a lot of scripting possibilities.
It also added a tooltip feature which allows games to define keywords and tooltips that will automatically appear highlighted and show the tooltip window on hover
Narrat 2.8.0 had a refactor of the config system to use a fully typed and verified config system which will show useful error messages when any config value is missing or incorrect on game load. This saves a lot of troubleshooting time during development as it makes it effectively impossible to have an invalid config file, and makes it clear how to fix it.
This update had a lot of changes, including a new improved game menu UI with dynamic tabs, and animated text display with standard autoplay/skip features you'd expect in a visual novel.
Narrat 2.6.0 had a new improved save system which included a save slots system allowing players to keep multiple saves and control separate manual/autosave. The default CSS look of the engine was also remade to look more clean
Narrat 2.5.0 came with the new overlay mode for the dialog panel (which is now the default). Instead of being a panel on the side of the game, it is displayed over the game.
This allows a lot more flexibility on where the dialog panel is displayed and which shape it takes, allowing all sorts of customisation. It also looks a lot cleaner
Narrat 2.4.0 had sprites support, the first version of what would eventually become screen objects
Narrat 2.3 had support for split config files, as the main config file was becoming very big. This enabled much cleaner and easier setup of various configs, as there are now many specific config files for each features, with most of them being optional.
This version also added screen transitions, and support for yaml over json (which is much easier to edit for humans than json).
There are way more changes than what's been listed here, but those are the most impactful ones.
Also worth mentioning are new games released in narrat since then, including games from the narrat game jam ,and more, like the recent INFIERNO RUBÍ
Tsurubami Senri and the Cheating Casino by Stanwixbuster
There is alsoLovely Lady RPG in development by Poppy: