NTag - text adventures

So... What is this 'NTag' Thing We Built?

Alright, look. We made a thing. It's called NTag (Newbie Text Adventure Guide), and we're honestly a little surprised it works. We present this... artifact... as a tool for one very specific purpose: making games that are just words.

Yes. TEXT. ONLY.

We built this as an "exercise in functional restraint," which is corporate-speak for "it can't do anything else." It’s for creators who think graphics are witchcraft and that modern game engines are terrifying, bloated monsters. It's a glorified notepad that lets you link pages together.

This is its core "strength" (if you can call it that): it's accessible. It's impossible not to be. It's just text. We couldn't make it inaccessible if we tried.

Look! It Has Features! (Sort Of)

NTag is phenomenal at making things that were popular in 1982:

• Stupidly simple dialogue trees ("Do you go left or right?").
• Prototypes for "Visual" Novels (minus the 'visual' part, obviously).
• Games that are basically just "Choose Your Own Adventure" books.

After weeks of agonizing development, we even managed to cram in ONE (1) whole layer of complexity: a Basic Inventory System. This means you can let the player "TAKE RUSTY KEY" and then, later, they can "USE RUSTY KEY." Please don't try to combine the key with a potion. It will probably crash. (Just kidding. It just won't work).

Oh, and it has Save and Load buttons! We're not complete monsters. We figured you might want to stop playing and come back later, for some reason.

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A Very Serious List of Things It CANNOT Do

We value your time. Please, for the love of all that is a watermelon DO NOT try to make a real game with this. NTag will look at you, laugh, and then fall over. It is NOT for:

• Health bars, stats, or combat. (It's not an RPG! Stop trying!)
• Random dice rolls or event triggers. (The outcome is always the same!)
• Timers. (No "You have 10 seconds!" It doesn't know what a second is.)
• Any background logic. (The guards don't patrol. They're lazy.)
• IMAGES. SOUND. MUSIC. (We told you. Just words. Stop asking.)
• Translations. (We barely got it to work in one language!)

If you read that list and thought, "But my game needs a random combat timer and background music!", then... why are you here? Go use a real engine! You can even use our other engine, the TXSR Engine, which is designed for actual complex games. You can find that beast over at txsrgui.pages.dev.

A Final, Solemn Vow

NTag is finished. Complete. Done. Cooked. We have abandoned it.

This means we are never updating it again. This isn't a beta; it's a perfectly preserved fossil. The good news? It's stable! The bad news? If you find a bug, congratulations... it's a feature now.

Enjoy this perfect, unchanging, beautiful brick. Go write some words.