I am a public school teacher. I’d like to assign my students to use a traditional IF authoring system, such as TADS or ALAN to create their own game, however, we are limited by two main requirements:
The students all have Windows 10 computers, but we can’t install any EXEs on them.
Web-based tools tend to be off-limits, as they don’t comply with laws like FERPA, SOPIPA, COPPA etc., basically if a student must create an account and the Web site offers any means for strangers to contact students, to see student’s work, etc., it is off-limits. …pretty much only Web sites designed specifically with teachers and students in mind are setup to comply. The students must be isolated to only contacting their teacher and classmates on a Web site.
An ideal situation is if the students write their code in Notepad, copy to a web tool where it compiles and lets them play, but doesn’t save anything on their web site, its just a tool for compiling and playing, nothing else.
How can we develop and play the games students make within these limitations?
Twine is web based and doesn’t store anything on the online Twine system. It is actually safe. No student information is stored. You can check in the Twine discussion area to verify. The Twine developers frequent this site.
I have found many school system IT department admins and school administrators aren’t very competent and even with sound logic explanation just block everything.
I’m sure there are other good solutions too but wanted to repeat and elaborate on what Chris said earlier.
Adventuron has already used in a classroom in DC, and exports games as operating system independent and sandboxes html files.
No exes. As Christopher said too, no accounts, and no monitoring of any kind except one single hit counter that is probably blocked by your as blocker anyway. Game text is not sent to any server. All local.
If you want to ask any specific questions happy to answer in the thread or via DM.
Out of the Borogrove options I’d probably go with Inform rather than Hugo. Inform also has very simple language. It is very expressive and powerful, and creates “traditional” IF (ie. text adventures). And the manual is excellent.
Twine creates “choice based” games where the choices are spelled out for the player. e.g.:
The castle entryway is lined with suits of armor and
displays of weaponry on the walls. The hallway continues
in front of you and there is a narrow doorway to the left.
* investigate the suits of armor
* investigate the weapon displays
* walk further down the hall
* go through the narrow door
It looks crude, but some very sophisticated games have been written using Twine, and it has the advantage of being simple to write. The skill is in planning out the way the different passages interlink.
Twine code for the above:
:: castle gateway
The castle entryway is lined with suits of armor and
displays of weaponry on the walls. The hallway continues
in front of you and there is a narrow doorway to the left.
* investigate the suits of [[armor]]
* investigate the [[weapon displays]]
* walk further [[down the hall]]
* go through the [[narrow door]]
:: weapon displays
You look at all the weapons, and find that the rusty sword is loose!
* [[take it->cool sword]]?
* [[leave it alone->castle gateway]]
:: cool sword
You wrench the sword off the wall. Now you have a sword!
<<set $player_has_sword to true>>
The other style of IF is “parser based”. This style of if produces something along the lines of:
The castle entryway is lined with suits of armor and
displays of weaponry on the walls. The hallway continues
in front of you and there is a narrow doorway to the west.
what do you want to do now?> look at swords
The source code for parser based games varies a lot, depending on the language you choose. Inform 7 is out, since you’re not allowed to install .exe files, but perhaps that’s not all bad. I7 has the advantage of not being intimidating for beginners, but I sometimes think that I7 code can be more confusing to learn because it appears to be natural language, but isn’t.
It looks like Inform 7 works great on that borogove app, I would definitely try that! (having just started porting some Inform stuff to Adventuron, I’d say that Adventuron makes it very easy to create simple adventures, while Inform has more flexibility overall and has the possible advantage/disadvantage of code that reads like natural language.)
