There have been some great new Undum titles released in the last couple of months.

I’ve been remiss in puffing them, so here goes. Please let me know of any I’ve missed, by DMing @undum on twitter, or emailing me: I’m idmillington on gmail.

Juhana Leinonen (based on work by Roger Firth) has ported his Cloak of Darkness game to Undum here.

The recent Indigo SpeedIF competition encouraged authors to use unfamiliar technology. Zarf built the excellent Matter of the Monster adding some new functionality to allow the story to be created out of order. This is now merged into the trunk, and is accessed through the “write” and “writeBefore” methods (see the API documentation at http://undum.com/API.html).

Also in the Indigo Comp there was a comedy porn space opera game Cavity of Time by the pseudonymous “Ed Packer” (availble here, with an excellent write-up by Nick Montfort here — “garden of fucking paths” — genius! [allusion here]).

Both Juhana, and the author of Bloomengine reported issues with IE7. While Undum is designed for HTML5 browsers, the fix was quite simple, so the latest version now doesn’t crash outright on IE7. I haven’t tested it extensively, however.

I’ve added support for small screens, particularly iphone, to Undum. Consider it alpha quality, until we’ve all had chance to play with it some more. I hope it will be the basis of being able to port undum games onto the iphone. 

I hope to get some time soon to write an XCode wrapper to allow you to compile your final game into an iphone game ready to go onto the App Store. Watch this space!

The code is available in the latest commit at github.

I’ve added block-form options for where to go next in an Undum story. To sit alongside the hyperlink style.

From emails I get, I know that not everyone likes hypertext options all the time (although Undum is a hypertext game engine), so I’ve added this as another option. It simply involves you writing your choices in an unordered list (ul tag in HTML) with the options class. The code does the rest. The documentation is updated, and live on undum.com, and the English version of the tutorial shows it in action towards the end.

The changes are checked into github.

I’ve just updated the code for Undum, with the new version checked in. It features a new Quality type: the NonZeroIntegerQuality.

This is a fairly simple mutation of the regular integer quality. It is the same for all values except 0. When the quality is 0, the old IntegerQuality would show ‘0’. This version removes the quality from the character panel entirely.

The commit also adds links to this blog (in the documentation section, which isn’t useful if you’re using Undum, but I mention in case you wonder what the other change is for). The update is available from the Github page: here.

Since this blog is launched only this very day, I’ll mention the other major work that has been published using the Undum toolset.

It is Lucy Hardin’s Missing Period, by Stephen Marche (wikipedia) published by the smart Canadian magazine The Walrus in their November 2010 edition.

Jon Ingold (author of great interactive fiction works such as ‘Till Death Makes a Monkfish Out of Me and Make It Good) has had an Undum-based game published in Interzone, the SciFi/Fantasy magazine (which is generally a good read). His work Flaws uses a neat and easy to understand option block for you to choose what happens next in each case.

Congrats, Jon.

(h/t Emily)