JACL is a language for writing interactive fiction, also known as text adventure games. It is easy to learn and comes with an extensive library of game verbs that will allow you to create the beginnings of your first game quickly and easily. The tutorial chapter of this guide walks you through the creation of a simple, but complete text adventure game and demonstrates all the main principles of the JACL language.
JACL is an interpreted language, so once you have written your games they can be run without modification on any platform that has a JACL interpreter. The JACL interpreter uses the Glk API to talk to its user interface which allows it to be compiled with many different Glk implementations on many different operating systems. Although interactive fiction is primarily a text-based medium, many of these Glk interfaces allow you to also fill your games with pictures and sound.
The latest version of JACL can be found at http://sourceforge.net/projects/jacl/ while the JACL forum is at http://jacl.game-host.org:8080/punbb/viewforum.php?id=2.
I would also like to take this opportunity to thank some of the people who have contributed to this system: Robert Osztolykan and Parham Doustdar for their invaluable beta testing, editing and suggestions; Andreas Matthias for contributing the preprocessor code; David Fisher for contributing the route-finding code; Niels Haedecke for his work on translation and internationalisation; Andrew Plotkin, David Kinder and Tor Andersson for their Glk libraries.
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Stuart Allen Sydney, Australia July 2008 stuart@animats.net |