Squiffy - Documentation

Squiffy is a tool for creating interactive fiction - that is, multiple choice games that focus on text and story. Players navigate through the game or story by clicking links. Sometimes these kinds of games or stories are known as gamebooks.

Squiffy is free and open source. It creates HTML and JavaScript, so you can upload it to your own website, or you can upload your games for free to textadventures.co.uk. You can also turn your game into an app using PhoneGap.

A player’s state is automatically saved to their browser’s local storage, so they can always pick up from where they left off just by going back to the same web page.

Documentation

Sections and Passages
Using JavaScript
Turn Counting
Clearing the screen
Attributes
Embedding text
Tracking which sections and passages have been seen
Setting the start section
Setting the title
Continue links
Replacing text
Rotate and Sequence
Master sections and passages
Importing Files (command-line version only)
Customising HTML and CSS (command-line version only)

Using Squiffy

You can use Squiffy in your web browser
Or you can download Squiffy for Windows, OS X or Linux
Or you can use any text editor and compile games using the command-line version

Example

Squiffy is a tool for creating interactive stories. You write your story in a text file. Each choice is represented by a [[new section]]. You can create links to new sections by surrounding them in double square brackets. [[new section]]: In addition to sections, Squiffy has the concept of passages. These are sections of text that don't advance the story. For example, you can click this [passage link], and this [other passage link], but the story won't advance until you click this [[section link]]. [passage link]: This is the text for the first passage link. [other passage link]: This is the text for the second passage link. [[section link]]: When a new section appears, any unclicked passage links from the previous section are disabled.

Edit example in ScratchPad →

Publishing your game

Squiffy creates HTML, CSS and JavaScript files, which you can upload anywhere. You don’t need to distribute your source .squiffy file - everything that is needed for the game to run is contained in the HTML and JavaScript.

If you’re using the web version, just hit the Publish button to share your game on textadventures.co.uk. You can also choose “Export HTML and JavaScript” from the Download menu, which will give you a ZIP file you can upload to any website.

If you’re using the app for Windows, OS X or Linux, hit the Build button to create the HTML, CSS and JavaScript files in the same directory as the game file. This will also open the results in your web browser for you to preview. You can then put these into a ZIP file and upload it to textadventures.co.uk, or you could upload them to your own website.

Contributing

Development Roadmap

Squiffy lives in two different GitHub repositories:

textadventures/squiffy - the Squiffy compiler
textadventures/squiffy-editor - the editor (both web and downloadable versions are from the same source)

If you find a bug, please log a Squiffy compiler issue or a Squiffy editor issue.

You can also discuss Squiffy at the forum.

Squiffy is completely open source, including this documentation! The source code and documentation both live on GitHub (documentation is in the gh-pages branch).