• Easy to Write, Easy to Read

    Alan code is natural and easy to write. It's close to natural language so it's also easy to read and interpret, making your authoring a breeze.

  • Easy to Play

    There are interpreters for many platforms, most supporting graphics, making it easy to supplement your story with tantalizing imagery.

  • Easy to Develop

    Alan comes with an Integrated Development Environment sporting a modern environment and tools to take your edit, compile, play cycle to seconds.

Alan is a tool for creating works of Interactive Fiction, a.k.a text adventures. It is easy to use. It's focus has always been on the authoring aspects.

Alan consists of a programming language and a set of tools to support working in that language to create games. The tools include a compiler, various flavours of runners/interpreters, a completely integrated development environment, a map generator and more.

Alan is in the final stages in moving towards version 3, and has entered beta state. This means that no incompatible changes are planned before release. So unless severe bugs or problems are found during the beta phase, games produced with a beta version should work even after release. So Alan V3 is now ready for supported production work.

Details

Alan v3.0 beta8 is now available. You can view the details of the changes in the Changes Section. You are encouraged to update to this latest release.

The major change is extended support for various national characters by adding support for UTF-8 (a character encoding scheme). It supplements the current ISO8859-1 that Alan hitherto has supported. Support for ISO8859-1 is getting less and less main stream so it was time to do something about this.

If your files (Alan source, solution files) have a UTF-8 BOM they will automatically be considered to use UTF-8, otherwise you need to give explicit options to the compiler and interpreter to have this functionality.

FUTURE: In the next beta release all files will by default be considered in UTF-8 encoding, unless you use special options. So beta8 is the first step in migrating Alan into UTF-8.

Details

Alan is continuosly built using a so called Continuous Integration (CI) job. Whenever there is a change in the source code repo on Github a job is run to compile and package various packages, the Development Snapshots, or alpha stream.

The machine that hosts that job had a sudden breakdown in February 2021, and it has not been rebuilt yet. That means that for the time being there will be no new alpha versions built.

Furthermore the last couple of development snapshots seem to have gone bad rendering them unusable if you don't have Cygwin (Linux emulation layer for windows) installed.

We apologize and will give updates as soon as that the CI chain is up and running again.

Update

The AlanIF continuous integration pipeline has now been up and running for a while. That means that new development snapshots are uploaded automatically as soon as they pass all tests. You can find them here.

Details

Alan v3.0 beta7 is now available. You can view the details of the changes in the Changes Section. You are encouraged to update to this latest release.

Details

Alan is an open source project and for many years source has been available, during the last decade on Bitbucket. For various reasons GitHub has become a more and more apropriate site for hosting open source projects. There has also been some activity there to consolidate some Alan related project into an organization not surprisingly called alan-if, primarily thanks to Tristano Ajmone. One of the most important is the alan-docs project, where you can find many of the Alan documentation projects. So Alan has moved there too.

I hope this will make Alan even more visible, and make it easier to cooperate on improving the Alan system.

(The old repo on Bitbucket, will still exist, but only rarely be brought up to date.)

Details
  1. Anssi 13th in IFCOMP2011 with Alan game

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What They Say

"[the game] does not represent the real capabilities of the Alan Language but does demonstrate Alan's amazing ability to allow someone who has never done an iota of computer programming of any kind to produce SOMETHING within a few weeks!"

Eric Mayer (on his game HeBGB Horrors)

Looking for v2?

Alan V2 is very obsolete. Use Alan v3 instead. But you can still visit the obsolete v2 information and downloads here.