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Announcing Choba, an experimental interactive storytelling engine

Over the last few weeks I have taken the interactive fiction engine inside Mainframe, the IF game Liz England and I made for Procjam last year, and have rewritten it in JavaScript. I've called it Choba, short for CHOice BAsed, and I've put it on GitHub and npm. It's open source, just like Mainframe.

I've also backported it into Mainframe itself, so if you play it now, you're no longer seeing a Python program running on Heroku, but a JavaScript program running inside your browser. (Doing just that has already been worth it. It means I no longer have to pay Heroku, it makes the game much easier to deploy, and I've already learned a lot starting a new JavaScript project.)

As you can see from the project's readme file, I have future plans for this engine. Writing an actual parser, porting it to desktop and mobile, experimenting with different game types, better tools, and new procedural generation / narrative AI techniques: these are all things that have come a step closer.

I don't recommend it for general use yet, but I do welcome feedback, and if you want to build a game with it, let me know how I can help.