Quest lets you create text adventure games, gamebooks, and other interactive fiction. It is free and open source, and works in any web browser or as a Windows download.

You don’t need programming experience to get started. Quest’s point-and-click editor lets you focus on your story — adding rooms, objects, characters and actions without writing any code. A full scripting language is there when you want more control, but you can build a complete game without ever touching it. You can include pictures, sounds, music and video, and customise the player interface with HTML and JavaScript. Games you publish on textadventures.co.uk can be played by anyone directly in their browser, on any device.

Quest has templates for English, French, German, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and other languages.

Use Quest in your browser Download Quest for Windows

Getting started

New to Quest? The Tutorial walks you through creating your first game from scratch — no experience needed. It covers all the essentials and is the best place to begin.

If you’d like to see what a finished Quest game looks like before diving in, browse Quest games on textadventures.co.uk.

Building your game

• Commands - the heart of a text adventure: commands, verbs, and pattern matching
• Features - containers, exits, wearables, score, light and dark, and more
• Script Commands - all built-in script commands
• Functions - all built-in functions, organised by category
• Attributes - how Quest stores and uses data on every object in your game
• How To - practical recipes for common tasks, from keeping a journal to building a shop
• Multimedia - adding images, sounds and video
• User Experience - customising the interface, fonts, panes and display verbs
• Characters (NPCs) - conversations, followers, and independent characters
• Introduction to RPGs - stats, combat and character creation

Coding and advanced topics

• Coding With Quest - functions, lists, dictionaries, turnscripts, JavaScript and more
• Advanced Topics - overriding functions, libraries, templates and translation
• Desktop Features - walkthroughs, debugging and editor tools (Windows desktop only)

Publishing

Ready to share your game? See the Publishing section for how to publish, size limits, and competition entries.

Reference

See the Reference section for XML elements, JS functions, and more.

Community and contributing

Quest is discussed on GitHub Discussions and Discord. If you find a bug or want to request a feature, open an issue.

Quest is completely open source - the source code and this documentation both live on GitHub. See the Developers page if you’d like to contribute, and Other Guides for community-created tutorials and libraries.