Why Questmark?
Questmark exists to solve a specific problem in game dialogue and interactive fiction production.
The problem
Dialogue systems in modern games need to do two very different things at once:
- represent a conversation graph — the branching structure of what can be said, and
- trigger side effects in the game world — flags, items, faction changes — when the player chooses something.
That means the people writing dialogue prose need to know how to write prose, and the people implementing side effects need to know how to program. These are rarely the same people, and the tools tend to favour one or the other:
- A scripting language with an associated editor attracts programmers. Prose authors either learn to program, or keep writing in Word documents.
- Proprietary, editor-bound dialogue tools make dialogue hard or impossible to merge, diff, and version in source control.
The shared language: Markdown
Almost every writer and every programmer already knows Markdown, or one of its modern dialects. Questmark leans on that shared knowledge: every properly-structured Markdown document with headers and in-document links is already a Questmark document.
- Dialogue trees and quests are expressed with ordinary Markdown — headings, lists, and links.
- Questmark-specific behaviour is added with small, backticked snippets of code where authors and programmers agree it's needed.
- Comments and annotations from writers and reviewers are simply Markdown that the Questmark compiler ignores.
The workflow Questmark enables
- Authors write dialogue trees in Markdown, which can be demoed interactively — by interpreting it as HTML, by running it in a simple Questmark runner, or by running it inside a game engine.
- Reviewers add comments and feedback in the same document, without affecting what the interpreter produces.
- Gameplay programmers add interactivity where it's needed — no more than where it's needed.
- Authors can edit prose freely without disturbing the dialogue's interactivity, and programmers can adjust logic without touching the prose.
- The game ships.
Because Questmark documents are plain text, they sit happily under revision control, where they can be reviewed, merged, and diffed like any other code.
Where Questmark stands today
Questmark is a proof of concept implemented in TypeScript. The spec is still informal and the feature set is still settling. The repository includes compiler, interpreter, CLI, and a test suite; the companion questmark-webrenderer renders and plays documents in the browser.
Open questions the project is still working through:
- How should inline HTML be treated?
- How can the compiler be extended with custom directives and macros?
- How can a document be translated to another language while keeping its scripting logic intact and easy to modify?
See also
- How Questmark works — the pipeline from Markdown to bytecode to a running conversation.