You can now download Quest 5.3 Beta for Windows. This release features a number of enhancements - improvements to the look and feel of games, a few new things you can do in games, some additional script functions, and general improvements to make Quest just that little bit easier to use. And of course, quite a few bug fixes.
If you’re a user of the web browser version of Quest, stay tuned - you’ll be able to use Quest 5.3 Beta in your browser soon. Update 5th Dec: The web version of Quest is now running v5.3, so try it out!
Read on for all the details about what’s new, or download Quest 5.3 Beta now.
One of the things that’s been annoying me lately is a prevailing attitude that somehow text adventure games are just a retro thing, that the way a text-based game should look is as though it comes from a mid-80’s DOS prompt. Well, I think the future of interactive story games is much richer than simply displaying a load of black-and-white text with a command prompt underneath - we have barely begun exploring the user interface for this kind of game. They are still new! The oldest text adventure game was released less than 40 years ago. We had not discovered everything there is to know about film making by 1940 either, and their growth was somewhat more rapid, without the whole being-pretty-much-forgotten-about thing to stymie development. The power that HTML gives us in every computer, tablet and smartphone is immense, and this is something text-based games should be tapping into and experimenting with.
So let’s forget the “ZOMG text adventures that’s so retro LOL!” nonsense and start to build something other people will actually give a crap about.
With that in mind, one of my aims for this release was to start to make it easier for authors to completely customise the game player interface with HTML and JavaScript. One problem with this was that up until Quest 5.2, there were really two separate UIs - when you play a game in your web browser, the UI is 100% HTML, but the desktop version of Quest rendered the Inventory list, Compass pane, input box etc. using standard Windows forms controls. This meant that the game looked a bit different and didn’t offer the ability to customise any of the Windows form elements.
So, the web version of the player UI has now been brought to the desktop version. This means that the entire game playing interface is pure HTML, and the game looks the same whether you play it in the desktop version or in the browser. With custom JavaScript and HTML, you can now do things like implement your own version of the Inventory pane, add your own panes, change the screen layout, create your own input method… and who knows what else. It also means that any enhancements made to the standard interface in future versions will apply to both desktop and web versions of Quest - any built-in “easy customisation” functionality would apply to both.
Furthermore, the desktop version of Quest is no longer dependent on the version of Internet Explorer that is currently installed. Instead, Quest bundles an embedded version of the Chromium browser. This is the browser that underpins Google Chrome, and is based on WebKit (which is also behind Safari and the default Android browser). This means you now get access to the Chrome Developer Tools directly within Quest - so you can play around and see the effects of tweaking HTML while a game is running.
Chrome Developer Tools in Quest
Quest 5.3 starts us down the road towards doing more innovative and exciting things within a predominately text-based medium. Of course we’re not fully where I want to be yet, and one of my focuses for Quest 5.4 is to extend the customisability of the UI even more, to make it even easier to try out interesting ideas. Keep on eye on the blog, as I’ll be documenting any experiments there, and please do contact me if you have any ideas!
Other new improvements to look and feel include:
Grid-based map example
Displaying cover art in the game browser
Showing hyperlinks for a command that has been entered
It feels like I’ve been sitting on some of these enhancements for quite a long time, so it’s good to finally get Quest 5.3 out, even if it’s only in beta form at the moment. I’ve been busy for the last few months doing some contract work, which has now finished, so hopefully the frequency of updates will increase - until my money runs out again, that is!
Many thanks to Phillip Zolla, Pertex, James Gregory, Aleksandar Hummel and Jay Nabonne for code and contributions towards this release.
Please download Quest 5.3 Beta, and let me know what you think - and of course report any bugs you find! You can email me at [email protected], ask questions in the forum or you can find me on Twitter: Follow @alexwarren