Having been an Atari owner and having friends who had betamaxes, I'm wondering what the future is for squiffy?
Personally, I enjoy the tool. I've gotten very comfortable with it and have been working on my huge game. I've gotten it to do what I want. But I see that the Squiffy feed seems dead and Quest is churning out comments.
For me, I am looking for a way to make a randomized CYOA game that permits replaying - I don't want to just right a once-through. I haven't looked at quest - I'm sure there is a way to make it dance to my tune. I just liked the idea of clicking on text (or even images) to determine paths.
Looking for opinions on specifics.
I would avoid Quest for CYOA games.
Quest games are compiled as .quest files, which can only be played in the desktop version of Quest (for Windows only) or in Quest's online player on this site. You cannot compile to a website.
The gamebook side of Quest is essentially abandoned. The only things which are updated are part of the Text Adventure side. (Quest is like three programs in one: a text adventure editor, a gamebook editor, and a game runner.)
The desktop version of Quest (which is what most people use) has a very, very old version of the Chromium browser. So, a few HTML tricks don't work.
If one were to take the time to make a Quest text adventure that looks and acts like a gamebook, that might be worth the while, but the player would still need Quest for Windows or to play on this site, and the Quest player on this site is not even almost as dependable as the Squiffy games. (I think the Quest games are on a different server than the HTML games. The Quest server sucks when it works, and it frequently crashes.)
I am more of a Quest guy than a Squiffy guy. I've made gamebooks in Quest, and I've made text adventures that look and behave like gamebooks in Quest. I've also used Squiffy, and Squiffy definitely kicks Quest's butt in the CYOA department.
The only CYOA software I like (almost) as much as Squiffy is Twine, and Squiffy is MUCH easier to work with.
I'm pretty sure the Quest forum is churning out comments because:
A. There is a constant flow of new users who (for whatever reasons) seem to fear the documentation.
B. Spammers.
...and there are also some very fine people.
Richard,
I appreciate your assessment. I read some of the quest documentation and really decided it wasn't how I wanted to build my next game. They even said that the Quest gamebook is the worst of all worlds. And given the extent of the work I've been able to do in Squiffy, and the fact that I'm building a library of functions I've used in different games, I think I'll stick with it.
The only thing I don't like is that top-section language (java? Not sure. The four-space indented stuff). One has to be very careful with that and write and build in small chunks. If something fails and you've just spooled out 100 lines of code, good luck finding it.
But still, yes, Squiffy suits my game development ideals.