Flowchart Engine is an engine for creating text-adventure games. It is (hopefully) very simple and straightforward.. It is written in, and outputs for, python only. I chose python, because I know it, and it is easy to create in python. It functions by containing one class, “Node”, which both draws itself to the screen, has a name (which is for developers to see in the engine), and a description (which developers set, and is what will be outputted in the game), and a list of named, directional connections to other Nodes. Every connection that is listed for one Node is a connection originating from that Node (i.e. the Node is at the tail of that connection). The connections names are what the user must type in in order to follow them (e.g. a connection named “North” means that the user, in order to go to the next Node, must type in North when prompted). Flowchart Engine uses Tkinter as the GUI interface, and contains the ability to save and load json files containing information about the Nodes. It can also save to a separate python file, as long as “template.py” (from the repository), is in the same directory as the “main.py”. It does this by simply saving the Node information as a list, and then replacing INSERT_JSON in the “template.py” with the Node list. It can also be ran from the GUI, where you need to go into the terminal which spawned the GUI, and play the game there.
I decided to create my own engine, after attempting to use several other engines, the majority of which did not have a flowchart, which I view as the most effective way, in order to prevent the heaps of information density that comes with a lot of unrelated text, and a bunch of if...thens. The only other one I saw was twine, which didn’t work that well on my laptop (the official browser one on twinery, however, worked a charm).
The repository is available at codeberg, feel free to contact me if you need any help or request something or anything (it’s lonely out here).