Undum

Remember those "Choose Your Own Adventure" or "Fighting Fantasy" books? Where you had to decide what your character would do next? Well, if you imagine that on a webpage, you've got Hypertext Interactive Fiction (HIF). Instead of flipping to a specific page, you click a link, and the next segment of content appears. To overcome typical limitations, Undum allows you to make the output dynamic. It lets you track what happens to your character (or any kind of data, really) and then alters the text you receive accordingly. Essentially, it's like writing a CYOA page that changes every time you read it. This makes game design richer and more rewarding. Undum is a purely client-side library. It consists of one HTML file and three JavaScript files. The HTML file uses some nice styling, so the default package also includes a bunch of CSS and images, but you can replace them if you prefer. To create your own game, you'll need to tweak the HTML file slightly (mostly changing the title and author) and edit one of the JavaScript files. Since the game is written in JavaScript, you get the full power of a dynamic and efficient programming language. This isn’t a limited CYOA scripting system—you can control anything you want. Alternatively, you can use Undum’s set of simple functions to keep things straightforward. ### Compatibility Undum is designed for HTML5 and CSS3 browsers. It has been tested on Firefox 3.6, Chrome 5, and Safari 5. Older browsers might still work, but some animations may fail, styling might not render well, and saving/loading games is unlikely to function. Anyone interested in modifying it to improve compatibility is welcome—just fork the project on GitHub. ### Enhanced Version Undum’s flexibility and power have made it the engine behind some of the most significant works in IF (*The Play*, *Almost Goodbye*). However, it has always been relatively inaccessible. Undum isn’t the go-to system for writing simple hypertext games; it’s a challenging system to learn and use, requiring authors to build their own engine on top of it to drive their game logic. Consider Raconteur’s "Undum, with batteries." ### Storyteller Archived blog: https://web.archive.org/web/20130127141625if_/http://blog.Undum.com/

Undum is a client-side framework for building hypertext interactive fiction (HIF) games. It enables dynamic output and player data tracking for richer, more rewarding game designs.