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JIFFEE is under active development, but it is an experiment in progress and it is not yet ready for beta release. Most of it is tested and works fine, but a few parts are still missing or incomplete, and even the architecture is still subject to change.
JIFFEE (JavaScript Interactive Fiction Framework for Education and Entertainment) is a tool for creating Interactive Fiction. Interactive Fiction is a form of computer game that has been around for decades - in fact it was one of the first types of computer games. Sometimes Interactive Fiction games are called "text adventures" because they are based on the idea that the computer says something to you (the player) using text instead of graphics, and then you reply in the same way, i.e. by calmly typing regular words or sentences instead of by frantically clicking or waving a controller. Although anyone can use JIFFEE, it was designed with particular attention to the needs of teachers.
If you are an educator looking for tools to help your students develop their language comprehension skills, then JIFFEE was designed for you. It can be especially useful for foreign-language and second-language instruction, at any level from elementary through high school or college. Adding JIFFEE-based games to your toolkit of instructional techniques provides you with several advantages:
For more details about the educational use of this tool, see JIFFEE in the Classroom. (To be fair, there are other authoring systems for Interactive Fiction which also provide many of these advantages, especially if you only care about English. The Links page gives pointers to the most popular ones.)
Since the best way to learn what IF games look like is to play one, you might also want to check out Games Written in JIFFEE for a few examples of games that you can play right in your browser.
Like virtually every other IF authoring tool, JIFFEE is intended to make it as easy as possible to get started and is free for anyone to use, but it also has a few unusual characteristics which distinguish it from most existing authoring systems:
JIFFEE supports writing games that can be played in different languages. (This refers to human languages like English, Spanish, and Chinese; not programming languages.) It can be very hard to retrofit that feature into an existing system, but JIFFEE was designed right from the beginning to support the necessary internationalization and localization of both input and output.
JIFFEE is based on an existing well-established language (JavaScript), so it can take advantage of the extensive tools, documentation, and online support that are already available. You do not have to know any JavaScript to start using JIFFEE, but if you do happen to be a programmer then JIFFEE seamlessly and efficiently puts the full power of a general-purpose programming language at your disposal.
Any game written with JIFFEE can be posted on the Internet, and then anyone with a web browser (even on a mobile phone) can play it by simply clicking on a link to it. While the introduction of Parchment has made a similar one-click-to-play capability available to many other authoring systems as well, JIFFEE supports it natively without an extra layer of interpretation overhead.
If you are already familiar with Interactive Fiction and you want to try your hand at writing games using JIFFEE, see Authoring Games with JIFFEE.
If you are interested in the design of IF systems in general and JIFFEE in particular, you can find plenty of detail in JIFFEE Framework Design.
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