InkQuest: Text Game Engine

What is InkQuest?

InkQuest is a program for making text games — the kind you play by reading a description of where you are and deciding what to do next. Think of a book where the reader chooses what happens.

You build the game like this: you draw a map of rooms, you write what the player sees in each one, and you set the rules by choosing from menus. Then you press one button and you have a finished game you can share with anyone.

You do not write any code. Not one line.

How it works, in three steps

• Draw the world. Double-click to add a room, drag a line to connect it to the next one. Fill the rooms with things, people and doors.

• Set the rules. Every rule is one sentence you build from dropdown menus: WHEN the player enters the vault, IF they carry the lamp, THEN show this text. That is the whole programming language.

• Press play. Your game runs in the same window you are editing in, so you can try an idea and see it working seconds later.

Typing or clicking — your choice

Classic text games ask the player to type (take the lamp, go north). Newer ones show a list of choices to click. InkQuest does both, and it is one setting — the same project works either way, so you never have to rebuild your game to change your mind.

Share it with anyone

When your game is ready, export it and hand it over. The people you send it to need nothing: not InkQuest, not an account, not even an internet connection.

• Send it to a friend by e-mail or chat — they open it and it plays right there in their browser.

• It works offline. No account, no server, nothing to install.

• Or build a proper desktop app instead — Windows, macOS and Linux, from the same project.

Your game is yours. No watermark, no splash screen, no "made with" credit forced on you, no royalties and no revenue share.

Typos don't ruin the game

The oldest frustration in text games is typing tak lmp and being told "I don't understand." InkQuest works out what the player meant — misspellings, wrong endings, words that only sound right — and asks a friendly "did you mean the lamp?" when it genuinely cannot tell. Players stay in your story instead of fighting the keyboard.

What you can put in your game

• Rooms, objects and characters — containers, locked doors, things to wear and carry

• Rules — WHEN something happens, IF conditions are met, THEN do this. Built from menus, in plain words

• Conversations — talk to characters through branching dialogue, with choices that appear only when they should

• Scenes — cutscenes and openings that play like a story before the game hands over control

• Fights, stats and status effects — if your story needs them

• Shops and money — any number you invent can be a currency

• Your own commands — teach the game pray, bribe or dig

• ASCII art — draw it in the app, or turn a picture into text art

Make it look like yours

Choose the colours, the frame around the window and the typeface, or start from a ready-made look: old paper, green terminal, amber CRT with scanlines. What you see in the preview is exactly what your players will see — it is the real game running, not a picture of it.

Write in any language

Every piece of text in your game is translatable. Fill in one column per language and your game speaks all of them; the game can ask players which they prefer. The editor itself is available in English and Polish.

Made to learn in one evening

A guided tour points at the real buttons while it explains them, the full manual is one key away (F1), and two complete example games are included — open them, play them, take them apart.