What’s the Narrat Jam?
Running from July 1st to August 1st, this jam is open to any game made in narrat, or using narrat in some way.
Do you want to learn a new fun game engine that makes creating interactive fiction games with RPG elements easy? Then try this one! Any project using narrat is valid, no matter how big or small. Prototypes, demos or unfinished builds are also fine. Just create something and have fun
Ok but what is Narrat?
Narrat is a game engine for narrative games. It can handle all sorts of interactive fiction games really. This engine originally started as a project to help the creation of a game that needed skills mechanics and a layout similar to what you’d see in Disco Elysium.
Over time that engine grew and has become more stable, used by a few people (especially queer people so far). It has its own simple scripting language for logic, and lots of features that you get out of the box. The original project it was made for is still in development (not by me) and has 120,000 words of text in it at the moment. All that to say, the engine has been tested pretty extensively on a huge game and is getting very stable.
What features did you say Narrat has?
A lot of people like how easy and fast it is to write games in, but also people who want to make games with more complex logic love the scripting system, and all the RPG features like the skills system, items inventory, quests system, achievements, and more. Of course you can also write plugins to massively extend the engine.
Here’s a (slightly outdated now) image with a non-exhaustive feature list for Narrat. It’s from this thread if you want more info or the text version.
What games have been made in Narrat?
Here are some screenshots of a few games made with narrat.
Fun little gif of a pretty map system for a game in development
This list isn’t exhaustive though, and by the way if you do make a game with narrat, whether as part of the game jam or not, I definitely want to hear about it.
And what’s the theme of the Narrat Jam?
The theme isn’t announced yet! It will be soon. Who knows what it might be. It could be anything. The suspense is killing me.
This is so cool. You know what, I want to make a narrat game now
Well it’s pretty simple, the syntax for writing games is very accessible, here’s some screenshots of the script and its resulting behaviour.
Time to head to the narrat website and get started!
Other links
Twitter announcement thread
Mastodon announcement thread
Narrat Website
Narrat Discord (I help people all the time on this!)
Narrat source code on GitHub
Narrat Docs
Recent itch.io devlog about new updates to narrat
Narrat itch.io page
