Open source

Quest is free open source software, licensed under the MIT License, which means you can download and modify the Quest source code, and even use it in closed source commercial applications. This gives you the complete freedom and power to make games according to your exact needs. The source code includes WasmPlayer, which is what actually powers “play online” - both on textadventures.co.uk (where you can publish a game for others to play) and at play.questviva.com, and it can run entirely in a browser with no server needed. See Hosting your game for the options this opens up.

Most people probably won’t need to modify the source code however, but you still get a lot of power from being able to view and modify the Core library. The Core library is essentially a Quest game file that implements most of the standard game functionality – the command parser, deciding which objects are accessible, the standard commands and verbs and so on. Because this will be packaged with each complete game, it can be customised or even entirely rewritten, without requiring any changes to the underlying Quest code.

For the Quest source code, see Quest on GitHub.

If you’re interested in contributing to the development of Quest, please see the Developers page.