Ready to write your own phlebotinum story? All you need is your own github account. Once you have that, you don’t need any special tools; github allows you to edit files directly online. (If you’d prefer to use your own text editor, then you’ll want to learn how to set up a github sandbox on your own machine.)
After signing into your github account, you can either
Either way, be sure that your new repository is public, otherwise phlebotinum won’t be able to access it.
Note that when you’re first getting started, you can ignore all the extraneous instructions about creating good commit messages, choosing licenses, etc. Those become important only when you’re ready to share your stories with others.
Once your story is published in your repository, you can use the form below to try playing it by entering github-username/repository-name. For example, if your github username is bmoriartyb and your repository name is trinity, you would enter bmoriartyb/trinity.
Phlebotinum will attempt to load your story definition from github, parse all the axioms, and then start interpreting player commands. If there’s a problem, best of luck trying to make sense of the error messages!
After your story is successfully loaded for the first time, you might want to bookmark the generated URL so that in the future you can skip the form entry above.
Phlebotinum always pulls the latest revision of your story from github. If that revision has previously been loaded successfully, then phlebotinum may use an automatically cached save of the initial state of the world, speeding startup considerably. However, on the first try, it will have to parse all of the files constituting your story; this may take a while.
There may be other cases in which the cached save isn’t available, in particular after phlebotinum itself is upgraded.