Jaqcards is an interpeter for text-based choose-your-own-adventure storygames. The input files are in a straight-forward format that's easy for anyone to write, whether you're a programmer or not (it's comparable to Markdown, if that sounds familiar).
Right now I'm working on a three-part story on the historical character of Alkybiades (loosely inspired by AC Odyssey) which you can already play the first chapter of.
Just clone or download this repository and run the Alkybiades game with this command:
python3 init_game.py SnakeInTheGrass
This will initialize all the right files listed in the SnakeInTheGrass file.
I'm working on creating a neat executable to download. Till then, stay tuned...
Check out the help.input file in the input folder! This file also appears when you run init_game.py with 'help' as argument. Here follows a quick recap of the basic concepts you need to understand:
Each story is told through a sequence of cards. Ideally a card is a few lines of text with or without dialogue. Some cards have options on them, more on that later. The default jump from one card to the next in the story is +1. In special cases you can set this to more and have the reader jump around cards (though this happens under the hood, the reader never notices). You can move both forwards and backwards with jumps.
Some cards give the player options on how to continue. Maybe there are two ways to go home, either through main street or passing by the church. Each option then sets into motion a few actions. One action will be that choosing the church route makes you jump over the cards specifying the trip through main street. Imagine you want to keep track of how religious your player is showing to be. Then one action you can set into motion by the church choice is to add points to a thing we call goals.
One thing that distinguishes Jaqcard stories from choose-your-own-adventure books is that Jaqcard can keep track of values. Specifically, it can keep track of writer-defined "goals". A goal can be for example "show compassion to character X". Now everytime your player shows compassion to X you can add points to that goal. And how do you reintigrate this into your game later? Well, with switches. Switches are special cards that only contain conditions. So, at the end of a conversation with X you could have a switch that checks if the points for that goals are more than 60, and if they are, X can show their gratitude towards the player.
To make it easier to skip to the part of your story that you want to test there are a few commands you can type instead of typing enter when you go to the next card. Be aware that this isn't the case when Jaqcards is waiting for user input.
whereami - prints the index of the current card
goto [index] - jumps to the specified index
Goals belong to a character and charactes need to be defined. You therefore need (at least) three input files.
- A character file, defining the characters that are gonna have goals
- A goal file, defining the goals for each character
- One or more cards files (if there are more they're considered chapters)
You can read more on all of this in the help.input file in the input folder! Be sure to check out the existing story as well.
I mean, if you're here you probably have some idea of what you want to do with this so... Just do it. The code is quite self explanatory.