Narrat 🐀 is a game engine I created to easily make interactive fiction games (narrative RPGs, visual novels etc) for desktop or browser. I’ve worked on this game engine for some time, mostly to help friends make their games. It’s been used on a few small games, and some bigger ones in progress. It was originally made to create game mechanics similar to what you can see in Disco Elysium
🚀 If you want to try it, get on the website it’s very quick
I want more people to try this engine so please try it or help people know it exists ❤️
Just plugging the Patreon before we get into details (read below for more)
The demo is a bit boring with placeholder art and content just to show features, and is pretty outdated
I really want to make a proper demo one day that would be a small game that actually makes sense and maybe has actual art... but not sure what it would be yet
Games made with Narrat
Here are some screenshots of games made with Narrat. They’re also listed on the website if you want to play them or find the creators:
🎮 Games from the Narrat Game Jam (they’re playable in your browser and free):
Two women in trouble by Mia (also free!)
Lovely Lady RPG by Poppy (in progress):
Features
Here’s a not really exhaustive list of fun features at the top of my head:
- 🚀 Super easy to get started with a tool that will setup your project either empty or with a template in a minute
- ✍️ Customisable characters, branching dialog and conditions
- 👩💻 Super easy scripting with a custom made language that focuses on letting you write dialog, but can be used for more advanced logic if you need it
- 🎧Audio support for music loops and sound effects
- 📘RPG features like skills with skill checks, inventory, quests
- 🎨 Accessible UI customisation with CSS allowing for a wide variety of designs
- ⚙️ Extremely configurable with a layout that can be adapted to different games
- 💡Plugin system (in TypeScript or JavaScript) to add functionality to the engine, new bits of UI or even extend the scripting language with your own commands!
- 🖥️ Steam export setup by default (the Steam overlay will work out of the box if you enable it)
- 🎬 Support for GIFs or webp in images for easy animation (thanks to the browser doing it for us)
- 🖼️ Dynamic sprites and text to programmatically display custom elements on screen (has been used to make a card game by someone)
- 🌍 Completely free and open source, and with a helpful Discord community to help with problems
Here’s what the scripting looks like (from the demo game):
