So what is this?
The Beginning
Project Penny Dreadful started as a way for me to pass time at work and teach myself Adobe Flex when I didn't have anything better to do. Originally it was going to be a single, static, text adventure game, but as I worked on it I realized that I was essentially building a game engine rather than a game.
I started building the creation tool (which became Project PD Builder) first, and after I had a general idea of how the structure of a game was going to look (as well as the saving and loading down), I built a simple game player (which is now Project PD Player) to run the game files.
I realized early on that the most important thing for me was the ability to write full-fledged and deep conversations. I'd checked out other text adventure game engines, and that was the one thing I missed. I've done a lot of work with the old Neverwinter Nights construction kits, and I really liked their conversation editors for the most part. Project PD's interactions are pretty similar overall to a NWN2 conversation, with a few small differences (and I'm still working on a few missing pieces of functionality).
What Is It?
Project Penny Dreadful is a GUI-centric text adventure game engine. It's intended purpose is to create and play games in the style of classic "choose your own adventure" computer games and books. Rather than the "guess the verb" gameplay of a lot of the old text-based adventure games, Project PD games have a full, (hopefully) easy to use GUI.
Games aren't purely text-based though. Project PD games have some graphic support, and I hope to add more in the future. At the moment, there is support for static images for actors in interactions, as well as thumbnail graphics for actors in areas.
The Project PD Builder follows the same idea of a pure GUI experience with no coding knowledge necessary. One of my goals with the Builder is that anybody with basic knowledge of how an adventure game works can use it to make their own games, then share them easily with others. My hope is that anybody who uses it will share their feedback and make suggestions for improving it, and it can continue to evolve. Soon I'm hoping to hammer the source code into shape and make Project PD totally open source.
Project PD is designed to be very shareable and community friendly. A Project PD game is stored in a simple, tiny .pd file (which is really just a zip archive). A .pd file can be played by anybody using the Project PD Player, and the same .pd file can be opened and edited by anybody using the Project PD Builder.
Since I know everyone isn't an artist or graphic designer, I've attempted to make graphics very portable and easily shareable in a format that Project PD can easily use. The Builder has a sub-component which allows creators to put together Graphics Sets, which can exported and shared between Project PD games as .pdfx files. Graphics Sets generally represent all the images related to a character, and a .pdfx is the exported file version of a Graphics Set. These files are easily imported and exported to and from the Builder. Soon I hope to set up a library with any .pdfx archives I use, so they can easily be used by others for their own games.
Where Are We Going?
Just to get it out of the way now, Project PD is strictly a hobby project for me. I don't plan on ever profiting from it, and have no desire to do so. All updates will be provided for free on this site, and all games I make will also be freely available.
With that said, Project PD is not my job, and I can't work on it all the time. Updates and bugfixes will be done when they're done, and I can't guarantee any kind of schedule. Obviously, the more interest there is, the more I'll work on it, but I'm not out for glory here. I just like doing this stuff, and even if nobody besides me ever visits this page I'll still probably keep working on this project!
If you have any questions, comments, feedback, secret messages, or spam, you can reach me at tinfoiltank@gmail.com. Thanks for visiting!
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