Since taking back over textadventures.co.uk in late 2024, I’ve been quietly at work behind the scenes making a bunch of improvements.
The site has essentially been completely rebuilt, which fixes a lot of long-standing performance issues (as well as making it an order of magnitude cheaper to run).
Previously it ran on Windows in Azure and relied on Azure SQL, which is a great combination if you have a lot of money to spend on a site that’s slow. Now it’s on Linux using Postgres, and the games have been migrated from Azure to Cloudflare. The site used to feel pretty sluggish, and now it’s snappy.
I can also now build and deploy new site features much more easily. Over the last couple of months the following new features have launched:
- Better Search. Previously we relied on a Google custom search, but after migrating the database to Postgres we gained the ability to use its built-in full text search.
- Platform Support. The site now lets you browse games by supported platform (Quest parser, Quest gamebook, Squiffy, Twine, Inform) or search within a platform.
- Language Support. We’ve got games published in 21 languages - English, Spanish, German, Russian, even a few games in Latin. You can now browse and search within these too.
As before, it’s free to upload your games, and you can make them Unlisted if you don’t want them listed publicly (though note that moderators do check every upload, even unlisted ones).
I’ve also started accepting links to games hosted externally, so if you want to submit a link to a game you host yourself, you can do that. The submit form for external links isn’t public yet (spammers would love it), but use the contact form and I’ll reply with a link you can use to submit a link.