hi there benji! i came across this engine while looking for minimalist 2D engines to study to base my own engine on, and i have to say i really like the idea of a text based engine, usually text based CYOA games are just handwritten in people's language of choice from scratch, so the idea of a text based game engine is really cool! could you talk a bit about how you came up with the idea and how you went about implementing the engine? thanks :D
Hey, sorry for the delayed response! I guess you're right that text games are often written from scratch. Even in my case, I had an idea for a text game I wanted to make before I started writing the engine. But, I thought it would be both beneficial and also fun to structure the code such that it could be used for other games.
Having an idea in mind for a game was really useful for developing the engine, because it gave me a clear picture of the features I would need to implement. You can see this from the very first commit on Github, which included very simple versions of an engine and a game disk to then be expanded upon.
Later, when working on the new features for what would become text-engine 2.0, again I was working in parallel, this time on three new game disks. One of these was what would become the new demo disk for introducing folks to the game, and another was a new story disk I was collaborating on with a friend. Once again, fleshing out those games gave clear direction for which new features to implement next.