Alan Interactive Fiction Language
Adventure Writing for Everyone

Welcome to Alan IF!

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.

Alan v2 copyright

Alan v2 is now available under the Artistic License 2.0, in the same way Alan v3 now is. This declaration takes precedence over any licensing or copyrights expressed in the source files or otherwise accompanying notes or documents.

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Known Problem in Alan v3.0beta3

There are no known bugs in Alan 3.0beta3, there are over 1200 testcases that are run before each build is made available, so nothing much slips through.

But, if you are using an older interpreter to run a game produced with the alan3.0beta3 compiler, the interpreter might crash if the game uses attributes for the entity class. So it is actually a backwards compatibility problem rather than a bug.

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Read more: Known Problem in Alan v3.0beta3

Getting Setup

If you are reading this text you have probably already decided that

  1. You want to try your hands on writing some adventure games, a.k.a interactive fiction
  2. You want to see if Alan is a suitable tool/language

So this page is about getting you setup as quickly as possible.

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Read more: Getting Setup

Development Status

The Alan development is progressing. Modern software development techniques are slowly seeping into practice. One such technique that has been put into practice is Continuous Integration. This means that there is a server that build the whole Alan system and then runs a lot of tests as soon as somebody commits some changes to the source code repository. If that build and the tests was successful, the resulting development snapshots are automatically uploaded to the Alan website, where you can download them from the box on the right hand side of this page or from the Snapshots section of the Download Area.

If your interested in our planning, surf to our planning board at Pivotal Tracker.

Here's the current status of our Jenkins build servers:

ci.alanif.se: Building for Linux and Windows on Linux  
 travis: Building for Linux on Linux
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Screenshots

Here are some screenshots of Alan in action. Click to view.

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WinArun running "Hollywood Murders" by Michael Zerbo
images/stories/screenshots/alanidesaviourscreenshot.png
Early version of the AlanIDE on MacOSX editing and compiling Saviour source
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  1. Publicly Available Alan Games
  2. Samples & Examples for Alan v3
  3. AlanIDE, the Integrated Development Environment for Alan!
  4. Links to Alan and IF Resources

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What they say

"If I was to write a new text adventure I wouldn't bother with any other authoring system. Alan is just that much easier."

Felix Pleșoianu

"Well, it was very easy to learn and it's easy to do stuff in it."

Mikko Vuorinen

"[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)

"I think its most attractive quality is simplicity, a quality that no other adventure creation language possesses."

Walt Sandsquish

"Alan definitely met my expectations. I was able to create two pretty large, complex games with no prior programming experience."

Byron Campbell

"Another thing I'm sure of, the game will again be in Alan."

Eric Mayer

Looking for v2?

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