I've just released Gruescript into open beta. It's an online development tool/scripting language for making puzzly text adventure/interactive fiction games. It's designed to make games that have the feel of old "parser" games like Zork, but play with a modernised, typing-free interface that works on mobile devices and suits today's players.
Design principles
Interactive fiction (IF) is broadly divided into "parser games" and "choice games". Parser games are the ones you type instructions into. Probably the most famous ones are the old ones, like Colossal Cave and Zork. Choice games give you buttons or links to make decisions, a bit like "choose your own adventure" books (with a little more state).
In the last decade or so there's been an explosion in IF forms, and a bunch of new authoring systems like Twine, Ink, and Choicescript. These mostly target mobile and web playability, because it's the 21st century, and mostly make choice games, a natural fit for mobile interfaces. (I want to make one thing absolutely clear: that is awesome. There's a subset of parser game fan who resents the fact that choice games exist. Gruescript is neither by, nor for, those people.)
Authoring systems, game interfaces, and game design are closely linked. Choice interfaces tend to favour story-centric rather than puzzle-centric design. Puzzle design is a Hard Problem if the player has to be able to see all their options all the time. This isn't to say there aren't excellent examples of puzzly choice games; but none of those systems make it particularly easy, at least with the type of puzzles parser games are remembered for.
There's still an active subculture around parser games (e.g. IFComp) but they've become more and more unintuitive to outsiders. It's not just that modern mobile devices don't have keyboards. Command prompts just aren't a familiar way of interacting with computers now.
So, this is my attempt to create a web/mobile-friendly authoring system for parserlike games, that identifies and preserves the qualities that make the parser interface suitable for those puzzly games -- snappy prose, a tight world model, rapid back-and-forth interaction between the player and the game, with generalised verbs that don't give away your options before you think of them yourself -- while eliminating the parser itself. It had to go.
(You may have seen the front-end before; I've used it in homebrew Javascript games, including Detectiveland, which was the first non-parser game to win IFComp in 2016. Like many "first non-X"s, it couldn't have won without imitating X as closely as possible.)
Gruescript's online editor is modelled after two tools I admire for their accessibility, cuteness, and strong followings among fringe gamedevs: Bitsy and Puzzlescript. My aspiration for Gruescript is to be IF's answer to those.
I'd love to know what you think of it. It's released under the open-source MIT License. Share and Enjoy!
Bugs: there are probably many. Please report them to me at robindouglasjohnson@gmail.com, letting me know what happened, what you were doing, and what browser you're using. Thanks!