Cloak of Darkness (2017)
A game from 90s, reimagined in 2017.
Well, you probably know this game. The foyer of an elegant opera house, the cloak. It’s a tiny “Hello, world!” of IF.
I made a new version of “Cloak” in my Salet engine. It’s a hybrid take on a familiar game: there are verbs and objects but there is no parser. You can even lose the game, which is rare for non-parser versions.
The game is bilingual (English and Russian) and it has a cool cover image (the artist is Maria Filippova).
But it’s 2017! The Future! So I added a bunch of modern features:
- Tablet-optimized, mouse-accessible responsive interface
- Now you can navigate these three rooms with an interactive automap! Why bother walking from cloakroom to the bar when you can open the map and teleport there?
- Night mode - for people who play these games only during long nights
- Multiplayer! Play this game with online friends! Get lost in three rooms and two objects - together!
- Autosaving and autoloading (caution: don’t try to use in multiplayer of 2017. The current version of The Future is not ready for loading multiplayer games without other players)
- Multiplayer chat with voice! Why? Why not!
The game should work in any browser issued in 2015 or later.
Play - the page weighs about 1.4 Mb
The engine progress
It’s an engine demo, so it’s appropriate to talk about the engine for a bit.
Salet is going great. I just updated the code with TypeScript definitions (written by @hogart) and source maps. The current version is 1.8.4 and the changelog (link in Russian) is long.
I found that it’s published on a CDN so you can use it even without installing.
The API is fairly stable around the CYOA needs but this game and the feedback from other authors showed me that the world model can be improved. The verb model in the source code from Cloak is just a small step in making a better universal system. I encourage readers to read and comment on what could be the future default behaviour.
Again, the links: