It is with great excitement that I’m announcing my newest venture into game design.
Middangeard is a modern Interactive Fiction (AKA Text Adventure) engine written in Go. Reborn out of an idea I had back in 2014 (to write a similar framework in Inform 7. An idea that eventually crumbled under the sheer load of plugins and the inherent complexity of writing code in a natural language), I have already made great strives since first starting work on it earlier this month.
While the initial parser implementation will be somewhat limited, I already have a long list of plans for future feature releases. Including but not limited to full audio support (through a subsystem dubbed Operatmos), graphics (potentially reference implementations in HTML5 and SDL/OpenGL) and Lua scripting.
Eventually, the plan is to move past “simple” Interactive Fiction and enable the creation of games belonging to other genres, such as point & click adventures. Similarly to how AGOS, the adventure engine driving graphical point & click adventures such as Simon the Sorcerer, originally came about (as a textual MUD engine with a set of graphical extensions).
Middangeard 1 is on track of being released by the end of May, under the BSD3 license.
Below: Code from a WIP Middangeard implementation of the Cloak of Darkness reference adventure demo game.