Hey IFers.
My name is Adam, and although I’m a bit new to the IF scene, I’m very impressed by the talent and passion in the community. While I enjoy making my own stories, as a software developer I felt like it would be a fun and challenging project to make my own IF game engine in my spare time. I’m definitely not trying to replace any existing tools, but it’s been a fun and illuminating development process, and if somebody else used the application and thought it was cool, even better!
I set up a dev blog for it here: Project Penny Dreadful.
Project PD is written in Adobe Flex, and all the tools are in-browser and online (although you can download the .swf files and run them locally if you want). Gameplay itself is similar to a RAGS game (everything is GUI), although character interactions work a lot like Bioware DnD games like Neverwinter Nights. There are two parts to Project PD: the Builder and the Player, which do pretty much what you’d expect from the names. You can use the Builder to create Project PD games, which are saved to a local drive as .pd files. Then, you can use the Player to open the .pd files to play the game. The .pd files are very small, so they should be easy to share.
There’s a lot more info on the blog (http://projectpd.blogspot.com), including a fairly comprehensive guide to using the Builder and a simple sample game. If any of you fine folks has a spare minute or two, I’d love to hear what you think of it. It’s an ongoing development process, so if there are more features or capabilities you feel are necessary to turn Project PD into a real IF development suite, I’d love to add them! I’m also interested in hearing about features you want to see that aren’t really supported anywhere else. Project PD is still in it’s early stages, and I’d love have the opportunity to turn it into something really cool.