Hey folks,

As a promotion for my new audiobooks, I'm creating a free CYOA story in Quest. The plan is to upload it here and simultaneously release it on Steam.

I noticed that on the Quest download page, they mentioned being able to package your game as an app. But I'm failing to find documentation that covers that particular process.

In short: If you wanted to make your Quest game as self-contained as possible, perhaps packaging it up as an app for Steam, what resources and documentation are available?

Cheers,

Bill Ricardi

Edit 1: Just wanted to mention where I saw the 'app' reference. It's on http://textadventures.co.uk/quest , and the line is: "Your game can be played anywhere. In a web browser, downloaded to a PC, or turned into an app. Get started now for free, or find out more below." Thus the question. :)

You have to do it yourself.

Wait for other people to come with details.

or turned into an app

That bit needs to be removed.

Hello.

Sorry to say this, but the chances of turning a Quest game into a fully-functional website are quite slim, and that's the first step when attempting to convert a game into an app.

The creator of Quest converted a handful of older Quest games into apps for a few people, but those the only successes of which I am aware. (And the creator of Quest has move on to other things.)

Sorry, again. A few of us recently tried to fix the conversion software (which was an unfinished, abandoned project), but we never came up with anything worthwhile.

That statement should definitely be removed from the text.

It is quite disheartening to find this out when we have already gone through the trouble of creating a game which is intended to become an app!

Sorry to say this, but the chances of turning a Quest game into a fully-functional website are quite slim, and that's the first step when attempting to convert a game into an app.

In that case, could you just package up Quest itself with the .quest file for your world? When I double click on a .quest file, it opens it in Quest, allows for saving, etc. That should at least work on PC, right?

Not sure what you are saying. But if you are saying what I think you are saying, I am not sure that's legal. I mean, the guys have been cool with anything like that in the past, including linking pay to play games (made on or made from other websites or programs). Other than that, I don't know. I do know you can upload the game file and Quest itself on Google Drive, I've done it before.

Quest is open source. So, you could package the binary files along with the game, and that would be legal.

But... There are too many possible issues to list.

One biggie is that Quest only runs in Windows.

...and Windows wouldn't know to open .quest files with Quest if the user didn't actually install Quest.

The best practice is to host your game on this site.

Once a game is submitted to this site, anyone can play the game online. From there, Windows users would be able to install the desktop version of Quest, if they wished to do so.

Quest for Windows also depends on Microsoft dotnet being installed, and there are other factors, as well.

...and Windows wouldn't know to open .quest files with Quest if the user didn't actually install Quest.

I think we get around all that by using Steam, luckily. Steamworks should allow me to say: Open this specific file using this specific executable.

Once a game is submitted to this site, anyone can play the game online

And as I mentioned, I want to do that anyway for the Mac and mobile users out there. I can mention that in the Steam description of the product as well, so everyone is covered.

It's sad that there's no easy way to make a mobile or Mac app, but this will cover a large percentage of Steam users at least.

Thanks everyone!

I think the inability to turn a quest game into an app or standalone game is the main flaw for quest. It's really unfortunate because otherwise it is an amazing program.