How to use the Bandersnatch Game Engine 1.0
You can now create your very own Bandersnatch game! All you need is a reddit account and an imagination!
When creating a Bandersnatch game from scratch create a new post on the Bandersnatch subreddit. The title and the description of the post is not relevant so get creative! Each comment in your post is a potential node in your Bandersnatch game (I’ll go over creating nodes in a sec). First grab your post ID as this will be your very own Bandersnatch universe!
In the example above my universe key is ad7cbr. I can paste that in the Banderdash engine url and to get the following
http://bandersnatch-engine.herokuapp.com/?universe=ad7cbr
Before anything will load you need to create a new comment with a “root” node. This is the first node that gets loaded.
Notice that the background color on this reddit post is grey. Make sure that when you add a new node that you click the “code” button.
You do that by clicking the three dots and then the code icon pictured here
Once you have a code box, paste in your root node!
Repeat the process for all other nodes. Each comment is a potential node. Feel free to add text comments and add to the discussion. If the comment cannot be parsed as a node then it gets ignored.
The node has a few key items
NodeId — This is your node’s name and how it gets referenced from choices the user has made
Header — The text shown at the top of this node
Images — A list of images. Currently the game engine only pulls the first image but in the future we may try to turn this into a little animation!
Decisions — The options the player gets. If the option can either be a string or an object. You can use the string for the most part but the object is handy if you want the option description to be different from nodeId
For example the left option is “Run” so the description on the screen will display “Run” and when that option is clicked it will try to load a node with nodeId “Run”. For the right option the description will say “Fight” but when the user clicks fight it will load the node “Death”. This Death node could be reused for any deadends!
Here is a link to the first Bandersnatch universe created
http://bandersnatch.herokuapp.com/?universe=ad7cbr
And here is the reddit post with all the nodes to give you an idea of how to create your own universe.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bandersnatch/comments/ad7cbr/bandersnatch_game_engine_test_1/
As of now the engine does not take into account any user upvotes or downvotes but feel free to discuss in the comments and help each other make the best Bandersnatch universes!
Cheers,
Colin Ritman
