Getting Started | Documentation | Player Guide | Troubleshooting

• About
• Gameplay Features
  • Moving Around
  • Inspecting
  • Solving Puzzles
  • Crafting and Cooking
  • Dressing Up
  • Killing
• Role Play Features
  • Advanced Dialog System
  • Private Whispers
  • Spectate Channels
  • Internal Monologuing
• Game Development
• Getting Started
• Troubleshooting
• Requesting Features
• Reporting Bugs and Contributing
• License

Alter Ego is a game engine that allows you to create your own immersive text adventure role-playing game that's played entirely on Discord. With it, you can develop an entire game on Google Sheets with little to no programming knowledge.

The basis of Alter Ego's gameplay is moving between rooms. Each room is represented by a Discord channel. When you move from one room to another, you will be removed from the room channel you're currently in and added to the desired room's channel. Upon entering, you'll receive a written description of the room, noting its layout and anything you can interact with. You can perform actions by sending text commands, or by using interactive Discord components like buttons and dropdowns.

You can inspect your surroundings to learn more about the environment, and discover things you can interact with.

Alter Ego has a robust system of puzzles, with a wide variety of puzzle types that can be programmed to react in different ways depending on the outcome.

Recipes are a core feature of Alter Ego. You can craft items together and put them in fixtures around the room to process them into different items over time.

Players have full inventories with lots of slots to put on clothes. The clothes you wear affect your character's description, allowing you to express yourself. Clothes can even have pockets that allow you to store items inside of them, which are hidden from other players.

Some items even have special behavior when worn. For example, wearing a mask can conceal your identity, allowing you to move between rooms without being added to the room channel. It can even alter your character's display name and description while you're wearing it.

Alter Ego allows you to kill other players. Usually that involves getting a moderator involved, but items can inflict status effects that kill players after a set period of time, too. If you play your cards right, you might just get away with it without leaving too much evidence behind.

The gameplay mechanics of Alter Ego give rise to spontaneous character interactions. Every moment of your role play occurs in a specific setting, with a specific context. This often leads to the development of unexpected relationships between characters that occur organically, as they are built gradually over time. The linear progression of the core gameplay loop means your character naturally develops over time as new events unfold.

Of course, Alter Ego also offers a variety of tools to enhance your moment-to-moment role playing experience even further.

Alter Ego has an extensive dialog system with many interconnected mechanics. You can shout to be heard in other rooms, speak across great distances with wireless transceivers, mimic the voices of other characters, and more. There's even a fully functional audio and video surveillance system.

You can speak privately to other players in the room by whispering. When you whisper, a temporary channel will be created just for you and the people you select. You can speak in this channel without worrying about anyone hearing you.

While you play, everything you see and do is logged to your character's spectate channel in real time. This allows spectators to watch the game from any player's perspective, and when the game is over, you can read over everything that happened in chronological order.

You can privately monologue your character's inner thoughts, and nobody except for you and spectators will know.

Alter Ego has a wide array of tools to develop exciting and unique game environments. All games are developed on a spreadsheet, and users require little to no programming knowledge to do so. Each data structure has its own tab on the sheet. On the spreadsheet, you can:

• Give Players unique descriptions, custom pronouns, stats that have in-game effects, and full inventories.
• Add NPCs who are just like Players, but don't need a Discord account, and can only be controlled by a moderator.
• Create Rooms for Players to move between, with Exits determining how they connect to each other.
• Add Fixtures to Rooms that Players can inspect and interact with, and set some of them as Hiding Spots so Players can hide in them without being seen.
• Devise Puzzles for Players to try and solve, with multiple possible outcomes that can all trigger different behavior.
• Add Status Effects that Players can be inflicted with for a set period of time, which can give them special behavior and temporarily alter their stats.
• Define Prefabs that can be instantiated as Room Items and Inventory Items, and can be equipped by a Player and/or used to inflict or cure Status Effects.
• Create Recipes that can turn a list of ingredient Prefabs into any number of products, either instantaneously by crafting them together, or after a set amount of time by processing them in a Fixture.
• Set up Events that can automatically trigger at set days and times, and automatically inflict Players with a list of Status Effects in all affected Rooms.
• Add Gestures that allow Players to communicate non-verbally with ease.
• Set Flags with values that can be referenced by other data structures, and write scripts that automatically compute their value when read.

Alter Ego comes bundled with a small but fully-featured demo environment. It demonstrates how to use all of these data structures effectively, and is free for users to study and experiment with. On top of that, the documentation is detailed and thorough, with many examples and tutorials.

For additional resources to make developing games with Alter Ego easier, try out Alter Ego Tools.

Alter Ego is strictly self-hosted, so you will have to install it and host it yourself.

The installation and setup guide walks you through every step of the process.

Once you have Alter Ego up and running, you can issue the .setupdemo command to instantly set up a demo game environment for you and a small group of players to get a feel for its gameplay.

If you're having trouble with Alter Ego, check out the Docs to see if there's a solution in the article related to what you're trying to do.

If you don't find an answer in the Docs, check the relevant category of the Discussions board to see if anyone else has had the same issue as you; there may already be a solution posted.

If you don't find the issue you're facing in the Discussions board, feel free to open a new Discussion.

Do you have an idea or a request for a new feature? Check to see if there's already an Issue for it. If there isn't, feel free to create a new Issue to propose it.

Please read CONTRIBUTING.md to learn about reporting bugs and contributing to this project.

Alter Ego

Copyright (C) <2019> Alter Ego Contributors

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Affero General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public License along with this program. If not, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.