itch.io

Hi - yes, it was a quite conscious decision. There are a number of reasons for it, that I should probably explore in a proper post-mortem at some point, but to summarise: firstly, I'm familiar with Adventuron, having made a previous game in it. I'm a writer really, not at all a programmer, and I have very little experience of coding. I'd have had to learn Inform from scratch and I wanted to get the game out of my head and into finished form before I went off the idea, so I stuck with Adventuron. Secondly, I like the engine and the community around it. There's a strong nostalgic appeal to Adventuron, especially for me since before this, the last time I had any interest in computers was at least 30 years ago. I like the way Adventuron runs in the browser and the way it lets you control elements of style to a degree that's not possible with languages that run through an interpreter,  like Inform. Also there's a strong community around Adventuron and a lot of involvement from the engine's creator, and that makes me feel vested in it to a degree. Thirdly, there has been a definite impression that Adventuron is only really capable of making simple, retro-style text adventures, often with two-word input. It does that very well, but I'm more interested in creating longer, more narrative works (I write stories, basically) and so part of the reason for doing this in Adventuron is to try and push its envelope a bit and show that it is capable, however imperfectly, of doing something like this. It's certainly a lot more work and it's certainly a less smooth experience that if I'd done it in Inform  (despite considerable effort to knock the rough edges off the system) but at the very least I hope I've shown that the capability is there, if one is prepared to work for it.