Quest 5 - Documentation

Quest 5 is free, open source software for creating text adventure games. It is designed to be powerful, extensible and easy to learn. You can create games in any language - Quest currently has templates for English, French, German, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Esperanto, Russian and Icelandic.

You can use Quest in your web browser, or download a version for Windows (or start with the web, and if you like it, download the game you are working on, and finish it on the desktop version).

Contents

Tutorial

Commands (and Verbs)

Features of Quest

Attributes

How to…

Multimedia

The User Experience

Handling Characters (NPCs)

Creating an RPG

Guides to Coding With Quest

Advanced Topics for Desktop Only

Reference

Other Guides

Contributing

Search

You can download a copy (31/Dec/18) of the documentation in a .zip file here if you prefer to read it off-line.

Tutorial

New to Quest? The tutorial will guide you through creating your first game, and is an excellent way to understand what Quest is about.

The Quest Tutorial starts here:

Commands (and Verbs)

Commands are the heart of a text adventure.

Features of Quest

Quest has a whole range of features built-in and ready to use. You probably won’t be using them all, so just dip in as you need to.

Attributes

In Quest, everything is an object, from rooms to items, from turn scripts to exits. What makes them work in the way we want them to is attributes.

How to…

Some of these will involve some simple coding. It’s not that bad! We will walk you through it and you can copy-and-paste all the tricky stuff. All you need to do is change the names so the code applies to things in your game. Look at the second guide to learn how to copy-and-paste code.

Multimedia

You can add images, sounds and videos to your game. These pages will take your the basics, and on to the more advanced too.

The User Experience

Quest allows you to customise the user interface (UI) to suit the style and mood of your game.

The first two pages require no coding (not even GUI scripts), the next three some very simple coding.

These are rather more advanced, and get in to HTML and JavaScript.

These are more general, and go into detail about the principles of UI customisation.

Handling Characters (NPCs)

Adding people that the player can interactive with can help bring your game to life, but is hard to do well. These pages will get you started.

Creating an RPG-style game

Quest can be used to create an RPG-style game, in which the player has a set of statistics, and these are used to determine success in combat and other situations. The Zombie Apocalypse is an example used to walk you through one possible way of doing it. You do not need to have done the first two parts to use the spells. None of them involve a character creation process.

Guides to Coding With Quest

A look at some of the more technical features of Quest. These articles assume you can at least copy-and-paste code. The first takes you through creating a very short, but technically complex, game, and is, if you like, the big brother of the tutorial.

Advanced Topics for Desktop Only

Due to restrictions in the web editor, the following are only applicable to the desktop version.

Reference

Contributing

If you would like to help with developing Quest, please see the Developers page.

If you find a bug in Quest (as opposed to your own game), please log it on the Issue Tracker, or if there is a feature you would like included. We cannot guarantee all bugs and feature requests will be addressed, but they are more likely to be if reported here. Try to include as much detail as possible, includiong a same game that illustrates the issue if at all possible.

You can also discuss Quest at the forum. If you have an issue with your game, this is the place to go!

Quest is completely open source, including this documentation! The source code and documentation both live on GitHub (documentation is in the docs folder).