Ex Nihilo

Part of this year's New Year's speed-if event I've released a hypertext story called Ex Nihilo. You may find it interesting.

It's (naturally) Vorple-powered but with a custom engine. It might have been possible to massage Undum into giving the same results, but not without quite a lot of work. Making a simple hypertext engine is not a hard job—the WWW itself is already one big hypertext engine. (Undum's strengths are, among others, ability to save and replay stories, which is a hard job.) Ex Nihilo's custom engine is only about 200 lines of code and mainly takes care of animation effects and deals with nodes in uniform manner.

The source code is available from GitHub, and archivists can download the whole thing from the "zip" link on that page. Playing offline is not possible, you'll get a network error at one point if you don't have a server set up. A text-only Glulx version is also available, but it's severely lacking compared to the real thing so it's not really recommended unless the online version is not accessible.

6 thoughts on “Ex Nihilo

  1. Upon choosing "light" or "darkness," I get "Cannot read property 'volume' of undefined" in a fancy red bar at the top of the screen. Later I get the same message in the JS console, attributed to story.js line 42 (audio.volume). I'm using Chrome 24.0.1312.52 on Mac OS 10.7.5, and Chrome seems to believe that it is up to date. I've tried three or four times, making similar or different choices, and the same thing happens every time -- first the onscreen error, then the JS console error, then the game seems to stop presenting me with alternatives. I hope that's enough to be helpful -- if there is something else that might be useful, please let me know.

  2. I've had the same experience as Jacques, running Safari 6.0 on OS X 10.7.5. It's when I get to "Then I sensed a presence" that my choices go away. Once there was a message telling me to drag the viewport, so I thought that if I looked around I would find a link, but I did not.

  3. The problem seemed to appear when the music didn't load properly. I've updated and it should now work better.

Comments are closed.


Did you find this article useful? By subscribing to the blog's mailing list you will receive an email whenever a new blog post is published. The address won't be used for any other purposes.