Anyone who remembers logging countless hours on text adventure games may be interested in a creation tool named Hugo. Dubbed an Interactive Fiction Design System, Hugo allows users not only to create their own text adventures, but to incorporate graphics and sound as well.

A rundown of Hugo's fundamental components is as follows:

The complete Hugo system consists of several parts, the most important of which are the Hugo Compiler and the Hugo Engine?the former takes text-format source code and turns it into a playable format understood by the latter. The Hugo language itself is an easy to learn, highly object-oriented language which (the author hopes) encompasses the best elements of elegance, simplicity, clarity, and power of modern programming languages. Also available is the Hugo Library: a collection of common routines, objects, etc. that are responsible for managing many of the "physical universe" aspects of the game. (And the sophisticated Hugo Debugger allows a Hugo programmer to examine every aspect of a game at runtime.)

Hugo - An Interactive Fiction Design System

Search for other Mac games news stories or browse our Mac Games News Archive.