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.

To find out what Alan is all about you can read the Version 3 manual. When you want to proceed to try it out you can download a copy of the complete Alan system, documentation or source code. You can This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. your copy of the system. To help you out you can read the answers to some Frequently Asked Questions about v3. A list of some publicly available games is also available. And of course there are also some links to other Interactive Fiction sites.

There is still some material here for Alan v2.x but it is becoming more and more obsolete and will be removed with time. Unless you are having problems with an already developed game you should look at Alan V3. There is a converter and a conversion guide available to help out with porting an existing game to V3.