I’m tossing around the idea of bundling QTads with my game (Prince Quisborne, of IFComp '23), with the motivation that its existence might soon become known to a wider group of people of my acquaintance, most of whom probably don’t even know what a text adventure is.
Is this frowned upon, and/or are there any other gotchas that would make me want to rethink this?
Is the question specific to QTads, or about re-releasing your game, or reaching a wider audience? Apart from the bit aboutQTads (which sounds perfectly fine but I’m not a TADS guy so I’m not sure), the other two parts sound ok!
I didn’t know if there were flags known to this community about “Oh, you can’t/shouldn’t bundle interpreters zipped with your game because…”
That’s all. I’m planning to make a Facebook post about making my GitHub public soon, so I thought some of my acquaintances could possibly also stumble upon Prince Quisborne, and I wanted it to be as easy as possible for hoi polloi to get started if they had the slightest inclination to do so…
QTads is released under the GPL, so you have the right to redistribute it however you want (as long as you include a pointer to where people can get the source, and some other restrictions that don’t really matter for this).
Bundling interpreters with games isn’t the norm in this community, because people invested in interactive fiction are generally used to needing to download/compile an interpreter for their platform separate from the game (and can then keep it installed for future games). Outside this forum, though, people like having a single executable that runs on its own with no setup, so IF released for a larger audience (especially commercially, like Hadean Lands or Never Gives Up Her Dead) tends to do exactly what you’re proposing.