1 INTRODUCTION

Text adventures or, using a more appropriate term, interactive fiction is a form of computer game which has many things in common with fiction in book form, role-playing games and puzzle-solving. To create a high quality interactive fiction game, you need to be more of an author than a games programmer.

Alan is a special purpose computer language specifically designed to make it very easy to create such adventure games with little programming skills.

The main principle of the design of the language is simplicity. That is, to make it very easy to do normal things, but also allow more complex things using more complex language constructs. This means that wherever a construct is optional, the system supplies some sensible default instead.

The Alan language has been designed by the author and a very good friend during several years of incremental improvement. This means that the language has a sound foundation, based on practical use, a concept forgotten in many software projects today. Tools develop and are made sharper and more powerful as usage is intensified, the problem domain more and more understood and the requirements increased to tackle new aspects of the problem.

This, we believe, is how software tools must be developed to give the support intended. Therefore Alan and its support system will also develop further. This version is, however, a complete and powerful tool as it stands.