Quick start

Stage games are comprised mainly of Scenes, Objects and Characters though to create an exciting and challenging game you will need to harness other mechanics that are bundled with the engine. Instead of starting from scratch, you can use the reference game as a starting point:

git clone git@github.com:stageengine/ferryman.git

Once cloned, you will have a fully working game, albeit nothing to write home about. Nevertheless, to build it:

stage compile ferryman/ -o ferryman.stg

And finally, to run and actually play the game:

stage ferryman.stg

> You find yourself face down in wet grass at the side of a road...

Make it a program

A .stg needs Stage to play it. To hand your game to someone who doesn't have Stage, turn it into a program of its own:

stage export ferryman.stg

You'll find it in exports/, in a folder named for the computer it runs on. Double-click it and it opens in a window. To play it in a terminal instead, run it with --cli. On a Mac the program sits inside the app:

exports/macos-arm64/Ferryman.app/Contents/MacOS/ferryman --cli

On Linux it's exports/linux-x86_64/ferryman --cli, and on Windows exports\windows-x86_64\ferryman.exe --cli. Add --help to see everything else it can do.