Fabularium: Interactive Fictio

Tim Cadogan-Cowper

About this game

Create and play interactive fiction on your Android phone or tablet. Also known as text adventures, interactive books, playable novels, z-machine, glulx, tads, terps. Fun for adults and also a great way to encourage children to read and develop their imaginations.

Fabularium can play all of the major formats: Adrift (including version 5), AdvSys, the Adventure Game Toolkit (AGT), Alan (2 and 3), Glulx, Hugo, Level 9, Magnetic Scrolls, Scott Adams Adventures (Scottfree), Tads (2 and 3) and Zcode (Infocom). It also includes a simple integrated development environment (IDE) for creating your own Glulx, Tads 3 and Zcode games.

Fabularium supports Unicode games, so if you would prefer to play in a language other than English, no problems! Either define your own keyboard via the keyboards.ini file (see examples in that file) or disable the built-in keyboard via the settings, to use your system keyboard. Keyboards defined via keyboards.ini can have multiple layouts and each key can be programmed to generate one Unicode character, a complete command, or even multiple commands, that are fed to the interpreter one by one. As with anything else in fab.ini, you can set the different keyboards you've defined in keyboards.ini to automatically load with different game and terp combinations. See screenshots for examples.

Fabularium takes accessibility seriously. Much of the app is now TalkBack enabled and the built-in keyboard supports "explore by touch" and "lift to type" technology. Accessibility features will continue to improve over the coming releases. If you are blind or vision-impaired and would like to help me with this (e.g. testing and feature suggestions), please contact me at [e-mail].

We care about typography! While the default settings should work for most games, Fabularium is also highly customisable. Make the margins as narrow or as wide as you want. Don't like the default fonts and colours? Change them. Adjust line spacing. Fiddle with other typographical features. Optimise that game for your device's screen. For maximum screen space, try using a hardware keyboard.

Fabularium is and always will be completely free, with no ads, and open source (code available at https://github.com/tccowper/fabularium). It does not come bundled with any games; you will need to obtain these separately. There are many games freely available at www.ifdb.tads.org and www.ifarchive.org. You can download these games anywhere to your internal storage/SD card and then add them to your library from within the app. The app is also able to browse and extract files from ZIP archives.

Inspired by the great Gargoyle interpreter by Tor Andersson, Fabularium implements Andrew Plotkin's Glk 0.7.5 spec in Android and can therefore support any glk-enabled interpreter. More interpreters may be added in the future.

For further information see the in-app help.

Questions, comments, feedback and suggestions for future features always welcome, please contact me at [e-mail].

Ratings and reviews

Exactly what I was looking for - a way to play IF games my friends and I had written on my phone. It renders the text just fine, and the keyboard works as well as any on-screen keyboard does. I haven't tried writing/compiling using this app yet. My only complaint- I can't get graphics to work on my Alan game like it does on my pc. But it may be something I'm doing. Or just a limitation. Great app. Thank you!!

Two improvements would make this a 5 star app. The first is a major bug, the second is a minor inconvenience. First, everytime I switch to another app while coding (like to a browser to look up something), it discards any unsaved changes when I come back to an app. Second, there should be an empty template project for both TADS and Inform. Otherwise, great app!

For sure, one of if not the best and most fully-featured text game interpreter I've ever seen on Android - but please, for the love of God add an option to use the system keyboard instead of the app-specific keyboard that is lacking autocorrect, swipe, etc etc. There's also no support for the classic and incredibly helpful text game function of pressing Up to reuse your previous commands.

What's new

v1.4.1

★ Reduce download size by: (i) removing p7zip and using Android's own ZIP library; (ii) using Google's new app bundle feature (thanks Google!).
★ Explore: you can now browse within ZIPs and install games directly.
★ Bebek: many bug fixes, performance and compatibility improvements. Can now play v3.8 Adrift games.