Releasing your game

Your game works, you have played it through, and now you want other people to play it.

How you do that is the same whatever you built, so it has a section of its own: Publishing your game covers what to check before you release, getting other people to test it, and the three things the editor’s Publish dialog can make - a .quest file for textadventures.co.uk, or an HTML version you can host anywhere.

One piece of advice before you go: however tempting it is, do not release the game you have built while working through this tutorial. Write something of your own first, and test it properly.

The finished game

If you want to compare your game with ours, or you skipped ahead and would rather read the finished thing than build it, here it is: tutorial-game.aslx. Download it and open it in the editor with “Open a game file…”, or with “Save to folder…” if you want to keep editing it.

It’s the game as this tutorial leaves it, minus the exercises - a lounge, a kitchen, a dead man, a bee, and a locked back door worth ten points.

What next?

That’s the end of the tutorial - you now know enough to write a complete game. Here are some things you’ll probably want next, as your game needs them:

• Exits - everything on the Exit tab, including exits that run a script instead of moving the player.
• Doors, locks and keys - a door the player can open and close from both sides, and combination locks.
• Asking the player - ask for typed input, a yes or no, or a choice from a menu.
• Talking to characters - Ask/Tell topics and Pages for conversations.
• Score, health and money - achievements, and the health and money features we only mentioned in passing.
• Handling light and dark - rooms the player needs a light source to see in.
• Pictures, sound and video - a game doesn’t have to be only text.
• Changing what the game says - rewrite Quest Viva’s own built-in messages in your own voice.

And when you want to see a whole small game written up from beginning to end, the next page works through Cloak of Darkness - the little game that everybody who writes an interactive fiction system builds first.

If you get stuck, ask on Discord or in GitHub Discussions.