The history of the game - Part 1

This idea has been around a long time, and I mean a lloonngg time. Back when GTAV came out, I wrote a CYOA game for the iPhone called PTAV (Plot Theft, Awesome 5). It was written in Swift, and XML really evolved from an idea I had about the game engine. I could have used the same structure to write loads of games, but I am not a story writer; I am a coder.

Skip forward a couple of years, and I rewrote the engine in C#. I am a Microsoft kind of guy, so that was the only option really. I played around with Xamarin and got prototypes working on various PCs and phones. The engine was cool, and you could plug in various rendering engines (text or HTML). Rather than XML, each line had a tag at the beginning and the line found be split into a number of different values. That greatly reduced the complexity of the game. However ...

Times change and technology changes faster. If I were to release the game, would it be on mobile (a nightmare of compatibility and certificates), all the various desktops (in theory it would run on PC, Mac and Linux), or should I bite the bullet and go web?

So, in summer '25 I started wrapping the engine in a website. It was relatively painless but extremely slow progress. Web is almost as bad as mobile development, with front-end libraries, back-end libraries, web servers, and all that. Most of which was newish to me. By summer '26, I had something serviceable.