Does anyone wonder if the effort that goes into these games is worth it?

Activity here is pretty much non-existent these days, so who are we making these games for, ourselves??

For yourself should be the main reason. It is an insane amount of work making a completed game, much of it tedious.

I wouldn't say it's dead around here, but if you want guaranteed feedback, you could try entering the IFComp or SpringThing. (There are sometimes smaller comps too, but I haven't really been keeping up with them lately.) Putting a completed game on the ifdb or advertising it on intfiction.org might get it more attention from a wider audience too.

But in the end, none of that is 'worth it' unless you're enjoying the actual game creation process on some level.

Marzipan wrote:
But in the end, none of that is 'worth it' unless you're enjoying the actual game creation process on some level.

I go up and down, but that's just my nature. Sometimes I'm obsessively enthusiastic, other days - like today - I have no interest whatsoever.

Marzipan wrote:I wouldn't say it's dead around here [...]

It averages about three posts a day. If that's not dead then it's at least in a critical condition.

It seems as busy as ever here, certainly busier than at other times in this forum's past. The main site gets about 3,000 visitors per day.

So why is no one posting?

I'm not trying to be purposely negative here, but it's difficult to find the motivation to push on with these games, when there's no like-minded people to feed off.

It is definitely worth it... if you make it so. I ran into your same mentality after X1 had a pretty low play/download count. I also struggled at times to finish X2, but when it got near completion I fired up the creative juices again. Now, that it is done (minus some 11th hour tweaking before publishing), I can say without a doubt that it was worth it. Even if X2 doesn't "blow up" (as if...), I know that I created a great game and a great story regardless of how recognized it is. If I were the only one that ever played it, I still think it would be worth it simply because I know the time and effort I put into it. And I'm proud of that. Finish that game, OJ. You won't regret it.

but it's difficult to find the motivation to push on with these games, when there's no like-minded people to feed off.

This is exactly why I enjoy getting on the forum, asking questions, and doing my best to answer questions. It is the lack of like-minded individuals that post here that keep me interested in coming back. I really like seeing how people solve similar problems with different and creative approaches. I love testing and playing the games because there is a lot of unique artistry that goes into both the writing and the coding (especially in the TA's). After finishing a few games of my own I can truly understand and appreciate the work and challenges that go in to creating a good game.

So... in short... yes. Worth it. No doubt.

XanMag wrote:

but it's difficult to find the motivation to push on with these games, when there's no like-minded people to feed off.

This is exactly why I enjoy getting on the forum, asking questions, and doing my best to answer questions. It is the lack of like-minded individuals that post here that keep me interested in coming back.

But if by your own admission there's a lack of like-minded folk posting here, who are we catering for?

As far as what I create?

Myself.

Why would I cater to anyone else? Make what YOU like. Period. If others like it, great. If not, so what. It's not like you're creating the game for mass marketing anyway. If my games were about catering, I'd make some zombie apocalypse game with some smut sprinkled in. Maybe a zombie sexpocalyse? ...

So why publish your game at all?

But anyway, I've unintentionally steered us away from my point, which was about feeding off and being inspired by like-minded folk. This forum has about three regular posters. Hardly inspiring.

Anyway, I'm not going to keep pressing on with the negativity. It is what it is and I have a game to build.

Because people might enjoy it.

The main reason to make a game should be for yourself, but don't look at the forum here and think the regular posters are your entire potential audience. There's tons of people who play but don't post. And more who are interested in interactive fiction in general, whether playing or creating, and just don't specifically use Quest and thus have little reason to post here.

Marzipan wrote:The main reason to make a game should be for yourself, but don't look at the forum here and think the regular posters are your entire potential audience. There's tons of people who play but don't post. And more who are interested in interactive fiction in general, whether playing or creating, and just don't specifically use Quest and thus have little reason to post here.

I'll concede to that. Certainly a more encouraging outlook and one I hadn't really considered.

At the end of the day, you're never going to make a fortune from writing these games and, unless you're very, very good at it, you'll get precious little recognition for doing so. So first and foremost you should ask yourself: am I having fun writing these games? Does it give me any kind of satisfaction? If the answer to either of those is yes, then that's your answer as to whether it's worth it. If people happen to like your games and provide you with lots of feedback telling you what a great guy you are because of what an amazing game you've written, that's just the icing on the cake.

If people are making games, they're not wasting their time posting on forums, lol. If people are in school, busy with school work and~or are at the end of the symester studying for their final exams, they're not posting on forums (well, they shouldn't be, HK looks away whisling innocently). Same if you're working, too. Game-making is not easy, and most people don't get recognition, as first, it's hard to just make a game, let alone a good game, and even then, you're not going to get recognized, unless you're hired at a big powerhouse gaming company, making a blockbuster game, and even then, with the top of sucesss and fame in gaming, people have no idea just how much work it took to make that game, even with having an entire team of professional programmers, for what, maybe 80 hrs of gameplay or a few years of use, before people move onto the next game?

Unless you're working for Nintendo, Blizzard, Microsoft, Sony, Bestheda, Firaxis, etc... (I don't know the big gaming companies that well, lol), you're either making these games because you enjoy it or it's just for practice, or it's both. Maybe, you can get some money out of it, free games but crowd funded seems to be better method than having your games cost money to buy, but you got to make really good games, and then market~publiscize them very well, obviously. And even then, you're competing against all the games that are out there, including the powerhouse games... who wants to play a text adventure game, when they can play Fallout 4 or Skyrim or San Andreas or Call of Duty or etc etc etc ???

----------


again, making games are not easy... you're your own example, you know how frustrating making games are, you question whether to continue or not, this is the same for everyone, and thus a lot of people are lost, as they realize trying to make a game is just too difficult, for such a very little reward. So, it's hard to build up and keep such a community... and what communities there are, are spread out further by websites, game engines, and etc.

HegemonKhan wrote:"who wants to play a text adventure game, when they can play Fallout 4 or Skyrim or San Andreas or Call of Duty or etc etc etc ???"

Old farts who have a bit of nostalgia withdrawal. I've got my gaming systems, but more often than not I revert back here because it's not mindless. It's a different kind of enjoyment... like those sadists who do Sudoku puzzles or math for fun.

Oh I know, I was just making a point, not speaking for myself.

(I love RPGs, especially the old-classic-traditional types: SNES generation of RPGs, and quest is able to make RPGs, just without the graphics and 3d world. Maybe at some point if I get a carreer and got the money, I'll buy the RPG-Maker engine, so I can make those old-school RPGs... though I can't do graphics... which is a big problem, lol. Except I'll likely be too old ~ too late, sighs. And I'm just struggling with basic programming, hopefully I can keep progressing, sighs. I'm just not that smart, as I wish I was, everyone else seems to get programming so easily, and it's not just because they've been doing it longer, they're just so much smarter than me, or I'm just so much dumber than everyone else, sighs)

I like Text Adventures (well Quest specifically), because it's the only thing I can do, towards making an RPG, laughs. Quest is at my level in coding and game-making, hehe

ya, it'd be cool to be working for Bestheda or Nintendo, making an RPG, but that'll never be me, sighs. Quest I can do, and am so thankful for, it's really wonderful! I just need to learn on how to actually make a game, laughs. You're so many light-years ahead of me, XanMag, sighs.

davidw wrote:If people happen to like your games and provide you with lots of feedback telling you what a great guy you are because of what an amazing game you've written, that's just the icing on the cake.

Can I just stress that despite how it may seem from my posts here, this isn't what I'm looking for.

OurJud wrote:
Can I just stress that despite how it may seem from my posts here, this isn't what I'm looking for.

No. You may not.

XanMag wrote:

"OurJud"

Can I just stress that despite how it may seem from my posts here, this isn't what I'm looking for.

No. You may not.

Fair enough

Apologies if the following sounds condescending since that isn't my intention at all, but the fact is that very, very few Quest authors make any effort to publicize their games outside of the Quest community. There is a very large text adventure community outside of this site with many different games being made and systems being used. If you want people to play your games and possibly draw people to using Quest to make their own games, and therefore increase this forum's activity, my opinion is that you must engage with this wider audience -- on intfiction, on Twitter, on Planet IF, and IFDB.

The other edge of that sword is that Quest, as a general rule, has a very poor (and in my opinion undeserved) reputation in the wider text adventure community. Either people don't know about it, or consider it a 'lesser' tool.

There are a few reasons for this I think -- desktop Quest isn't easy to use on Mac, a popular OS for text adventure writers. Second, there is a stigma that Quest is an 'easy' tool for 'beginners', even though I think it's much more capable than many popular tools. Third there aren't a lot of good Quest games out there for people to get a good impression of Quest from. I think people simply are unaware of how capable a tool Quest is.

george wrote:The other edge of that sword is that Quest, as a general rule, has a very poor (and in my opinion undeserved) reputation in the wider text adventure community. Either people don't know about it, or consider it a 'lesser' tool.

If this is the case, then I totally fail to see why. I know you've given your own possible reasons for this, but what the hell does it matter how the game was made. If the finished game does everything a text adventure should, why should it matter what software was used?

One thing I will say about Quest, is that far far too many authors go with default layout, which is far from the prettiest I've ever seen. Quest is endlessly customizable, but hardly anyone bothers making their game look unique.

Not that I want to blow my own trumpet here, but if it wasn't for the host giving it away, I'd defy anyone to tell me what software I'd used to create my game.

I don't actually think Quest has a poor reputation in the rest of the IF world any more, unless you take davidw to be their sole representative. Do you have any recent evidence?

Remember, a Quest game came 3rd in the IFComp last year!

That game coming 3rd place aside, when was the last time a Quest game got any kind of recognition or even mention outside of Quest circles? I don't claim to be a representative of the wider IF scene, but I'm hardly the first person here to comment on the fact that Quest has a pretty poor reputation.

If Quest does have a BR, it's because of the users. Too many people using Quest release half-finished, error-infested, and downright silly games. Maybe submitted games need to go through some kind of quality control stage before going live, but that would mean an insurmountable amount of work for Alex.

Also - and I know many may consider this a silly point, let alone almost impossible to control - but the artwork for the game's 'covers' is more often than not dreadful and evokes the same negative feeling one gets when looking at the covers for self-published novels. I appreciate not everyone has the artistic ability to create decent artwork for their games, but in these cases they should just go with the title.

The problem with Quest is that it is too easy to use. Any idiot can use it and publish a game a few hours later. And that game will be awful.

To use Inform, on the other hand, takes a real commitment to understand before you can do anything. The quality control is in effect at the barrier to using the tool in the first place.

Too easy? I am that idiot and I still struggle.

It may be too easy if you're talking about creating a game with half a dozen rooms and no puzzles, but I'd say Quest was far from easy if you intend to unleash its full potential.

If Inform is as inaccessible as you make out, then I for one am even less inclined to give it a try. I have neither the time, desire nor inclination to waste hours of my life learning to use software to make a game I can already do with Quest.

OurJud wrote:If Quest does have a BR, it's because of the users. Too many people using Quest release half-finished, error-infested, and downright silly games.

Exactly. It doesn't matter what the system is like if 99% of the games written with it are buggy messes. There may be some absolute classics out there, but most people will come across the buggy messes first and never stick around long enough to get to the classics. Until such time as some kind of quality control is enforced to weed out the bad games from the good ones, its bad reputation will remain.

OurJud wrote:Too easy? I am that idiot and I still struggle.

It may be too easy if you're talking about creating a game with half a dozen rooms and no puzzles, but I'd say Quest was far from easy if you intend to unleash its full potential.

If Inform is as inaccessible as you make out, then I for one am even less inclined to give it a try. I have neither the time, desire nor inclination to waste hours of my life learning to use software to make a game I can already do with Quest.

For what it's worth, I find the natural language of Inform 7 a lot easier to get my head around than the coding of Quest. The basics of Inform 7 are very easy indeed and even the more complex stuff isn't too hard for a non-programmer to figure out. But don't take my word for it. Try both and see which one you like.

But is Inform infinitely customisable, in the same way Quest is? It's an absolute must for me. If I can't make my game look exactly as I wish, I'm simply not interested.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'infinitely customisable' but then I'm no real expert with Inform anyway. Feel free to ask on http://www.intfiction.org/forum/index.php if you like. I'm sure someone on there could answer your questions. They've been pretty good with answers whenever I've ran into problems.

I posted the question, but it needs approving first.

In all honesty I can't see me even trying Inform. I've put too much time into learning Quest.

I also have to say if the 'last post' dates are any clue, activity there is no better than it is here.

I did think the same thing one time about ADRIFT, but then things changed in the ADRIFT world and I ended up looking around for something else to use. At the very least, it's handy knowing there are always other systems out there in case the one you prefer falls out of favour with you.

Can somebody point me to a recent example of somebody expressing this "bad reputation"?

OurJud wrote:Too easy? I am that idiot and I still struggle.

It may be too easy if you're talking about creating a game with half a dozen rooms and no puzzles, but I'd say Quest was far from easy if you intend to unleash its full potential.

That is my point. To do the basics, to produce the "half-finished, error-infested, and downright silly games" is dead easy. Anyone can do it with Quest, because the basics are so simple.

You want to make good. That is why you are struggling. Realising the full potential will take years. I am still coming across new things.

By the way the author of the IFcomp 2014 game that Alex mentioned has said:

It looks like the number of people who could vote on it was limited due to it being in Quest; I didn't have enough time to learn a new system before the competition, but I have been working with Inform, which has a steeper learning curve at the beginning but makes it a lot easier to do certain more complicated things, so I hope to have much livelier and more interactive environments in my next game (as well as the game being playable offline to more people).

http://www.intfiction.org/forum/viewtop ... &view=next

I think she is wrong, but that is the perception.

Fair point, TP. Meanwhile I'm still waiting to have my post about degree of customisation approved, let alone answered.

They had a big problem with spam on there at one time, not to mention a particularly nasty troll, so the approving of posts for new members was put in place. I don't think it takes long for approval to come through though.

davidw wrote:[...] not to mention a particularly nasty troll...

Well it is a text adventure forum.

Thankfully the troll has been well and truly kil- er banned now.

OurJud wrote:I posted the question, but it needs approving first.

In all honesty I can't see me even trying Inform. I've put too much time into learning Quest.

I also have to say if the 'last post' dates are any clue, activity there is no better than it is here.

Well, I wasn't suggesting you switch over, but for questions of game design or theory, parser IF is parser IF regardless of the system, and it's good to get some input and experience playing games with other systems. There's literal decades worth of reviews and discussion to dig through that tend to go a lot deeper than a lot of what you see here. (Dig back, waaay back through the SPAG archives sometime, it can be eye opening and pretty fascinating seeing people taking IF so seriously as an art form.)

I've noticed Quest users tend to skew pretty young. Which is not a bad thing, it means this site is continuously getting new blood, but there's a lot to be learned from older IF games too and the higher standards they tended to be held to.

But the problem with oldschool IF discussion is that it never adapted well to the end of the Usenet days and became so scattered. Private review sites and blogs, and the popularity of Twine has only fragmented things more. The intfiction forums are the closest to a central place for discussion I can think of, though Peter Pears who posts here sometimes has his own discussion site too, I'm just drawing a blank on what it's called or where it is.

The oldschool crowd does seem to have this irrational dislike for Windows too, which is why ADRIFT was always hurting for mainstream players in the same way Quest supposedly is. But Quest games can be played online at least which is...face it, that's the way most people would prefer to play now unless you're old and cranky and set in your ways. Like me.

Marzipan, maybe you're thinking of intfic.com? That forum is much smaller. I think Peter Pears did have a blog at one point.

OJ, as far as the infinitely customizable thing goes, IMO Quest is more customizable with fewer hoops compared to Inform.

Alex, that quote Pixie posted is recent, and I think it's a real problem that the author of a Quest game that placed highly in IFComp (the one you cited in fact earlier in the thread) decided to drop Quest in favor of Inform.

My question about customisation has now had a couple of answers, and it seems the way forward would be to publish the game on my website and then use CSS. Not really what I was looking for.

I don't say this out of any devotion to Quest, but Inform and its forum seems to be very inaccessible. I browsed the Announcement and Beta Testing section, with the intention of simply trying a game which had been built with inform, so that I could see what my starting point would be in terms of layout and design, but all I found was endless links to .zip files and other websites where the game could be downloaded.

Seems they don't offer any means of playing Inform games online, which kind of puts the nail in the coffin for me. I know it's preferable to have someone download your game, as performance is usually smoother when it doesn't have to rely on internet speeds, etc, but to not have an online option for casual TA players is poor in my opinion.

OurJud wrote:Seems they don't offer any means of playing Inform games online, which kind of puts the nail in the coffin for me. I know it's preferable to have someone download your game, as performance is usually smoother when it doesn't have to rely on internet speeds, etc, but to not have an online option for casual TA players is poor in my opinion.

You generally don't see demos and partially completed games put forward the way you do here, but many (not all) complete games are playable online at the ifdb (http://www.ifdb.tads.org)

intfiction.org and intfic.com are just places for discussion of IF...game designs, contests, hint requests or questions or reviews, etc. Not for uploading or showcasing the games themselves really, that's what the database is for.

Again, I hadn't been suggesting you switch over to Inform or anything of the sort, just pointing out that there were other places to take general game design questions or ask for opinions where you might get a wider range or more detailed answers than you do here, from people who have been playing and writing IF a very long time. Parser IF is parser IF, and in what's already such a niche hobby it may not be the wisest thing for fans of it to segregate themselves by the program they're using to write it.

edit: here's an Inform game from a few years back I'm playing right now: Floatpoint. I've got it on my computer, but just tested the play online link there and it's working with Parchment.

Marzipan wrote:Again, I hadn't been suggesting you switch over to Inform or anything of the sort, just pointing out that there were other places to take general game design questions or ask for opinions where you might get a wider range or more detailed answers than you do here, from people who have been playing and writing IF a very long time.

Oh, I realise that. These investigations are just to satisfy my curiosity.

Thanks for the links

OurJud wrote:My question about customisation has now had a couple of answers, and it seems the way forward would be to publish the game on my website and then use CSS. Not really what I was looking for.

I don't say this out of any devotion to Quest, but Inform and its forum seems to be very inaccessible. I browsed the Announcement and Beta Testing section, with the intention of simply trying a game which had been built with inform, so that I could see what my starting point would be in terms of layout and design, but all I found was endless links to .zip files and other websites where the game could be downloaded.

Seems they don't offer any means of playing Inform games online, which kind of puts the nail in the coffin for me. I know it's preferable to have someone download your game, as performance is usually smoother when it doesn't have to rely on internet speeds, etc, but to not have an online option for casual TA players is poor in my opinion.

If you just want an idea of what Inform is capable of, check out some of the recent IFComp entries. Or pick some of the top rated games off IFDB. The two most talked about games of recent years - Counterfeit Monkey and Hadean Lands - were both written in Inform.

Most of the games can be played online if you want, though it's generally something I avoid like the plague. If I can't download a game and play it, I don't tend to bother.

I want to add that intfiction is not 'the Inform forum' though it might give that impression by the number of Inform posts -- that's just because Inform has no specific forum of its own, so people go to Intfiction.

davidw wrote:

"OurJud"

Most of the games can be played online if you want, though it's generally something I avoid like the plague. If I can't download a game and play it, I don't tend to bother.

What's your reasoning for this?

Just that I prefer playing to download a game instead of playing it online.

davidw wrote:Just that I prefer playing to download a game instead of playing it online.

Oh, I see. It was just the 'avoid like the plague' that had me wondering.

Do I need to install Inform in order to download and play the games?

No, you need an interpreter like Gargoyle, Spatterlight or Zoom. But you can go to IFDB and play many Inform games online without downloading anything.

george wrote:No, you need an interpreter like Gargoyle, Spatterlight or Zoom. But you can go to IFDB and play many Inform games online without downloading anything.

Yes, I understand this, it's just that Counterfeit Monkey which david linked to on the previous page freezes up my computer when I try to play it online.

Oh right, there's a lot going on in that game.

I don't think Counterfeit Monkey can be played online due to its size and complexity, but most Inform 7 games can be played online.

Here's where to get Gargoyle: https://github.com/garglk/garglk/releas ... ble-2011.1

It's nice not having to use separate programs for the different game types, but I'm not really sure why the main site just offers a tiny link to github at the very bottom without any explanation of where or how to find the actual file you want to download in that mess...

e: Savoir Faire is another by the author of Counterfeit Monkey. Made with an older version of Inform, it's still one of my favorites as far as more puzzley games goes, and I liked the way she handled the use of magic.

davidw wrote:I don't think Counterfeit Monkey can be played online...

But it has a 'Play online' link?

I don't know about that, I'm just going on what the author herself said. I guess in theory it might play online, but I haven't tried. I'd much sooner just download and play games.

davidw wrote:I'd much sooner just download and play games.

I'm coming round to that thinking, too. I tried to resume A Stranger, Unregarded today, and it was constantly lagging and refusing to take commands. I got so fed up that I ended up downloading it even though I knew I'd have to start from the beginning again. It was worth it, though, as it played without any hiccups at all.

The main reasons I dislike playing games online:

> I played a game a few years ago that was written with Internet Explorer in mind, which I didn't find out till I'd struggled to play it with Firefox and had crashes, freezes, lag, etc. Another game was meant to work with Firefox but by the time I played it, Firefox had been updated several times and the game hadn't, so I again ended up with crashes, freezes, lag, etc.

> Lag: this seems to be present in every game I play online. When you're playing a big game, you spend longer waiting for the commands to be processed than you do actually playing the game.

> Crashes. My browser crashes very rarely but I've found when playing online games, it had a tendency to crash all the time. And when it crashes, I lose whatever progress I've made on the game and have to start again. I can't remember the last time a game I've downloaded and played offline crashed and lost my progress.

> Missing features: I haven't played that many games online but the ones I've tried always seem to miss features that are present if you download them. No changing of font sizes or styles, colours are fixed and sound and graphics often don't work properly.

> The delete button: a few times I've pressed the delete button to correct a mistake and the browser has taken me right out of the game and to the previous website I was on, thus losing all my progress along the way.

> Save game positions: one time I saved a game I was playing online then when I played it again a few days later, it asked me to name my saves game position. I couldn't remember so I was forced to start again. On a downloaded game, even if I couldn't remember the name, I could still find the saved game because it'd be in the same location as the game file.

So for me if I have a choice between downloading a game and playing it online, I'll download it every time. If there's no option to download it, I probably won't bother with it at all.

I'm not connected to the internet 24/7, and when I am I'm dependent on some very spotty wi-fi using my phone as a hotspot, with a data limit. The trend of most games now requiring a connection and downloads of huge patches to install or even play isn't one that's made me happy. (Got a huge Steam library from back when I still lived in town and I can only access a fraction of it, and for a long time 'offline play' was broken and not available at all...)

So needless to say I've always been very happy piling up a collection of IF games with tiny tiny file sizes that I can pick up and play whenever I feel like. Lagging and freezing when playing online is also a problem, and also the fact that the author can move or change the game I'm in the middle of playing at any time.

The play online links do make the game more accessible if I'm not using my home computer, and easy to recommend for people who don't understand about installing interpreters. (The mainstream IF community as usual, doing nothing to make them more accessible for newbies. A list of direct, clearly labeled downloads with installation instructions on the ifdb and a few other places has apparently never crossed their minds...)

But mostly I just use online play as a quick and easy way to preview a game. For serious play, starting up a program and opening a file with it, with all the fonts and colors and settings I prefer, just for whatever reason leads to a much more focused and enjoyable gameplay experience for me.

All that said, I still absolutely support online play options, mostly for the sake of new users as I said. That's just the norm now, and it's expected. Hard to recommend a game when you have to go 'but wait, first download this program...no THIS version not that one, then download the separate game file...' And that's more trouble than most people idly browsing the internet will be willing to put in for something they only have a mild spark of curiosity over. One of the biggest weaknesses of ADRIFT, IMO, is the lack of accessibility to new players there. There's nowhere on the not terribly inviting looking site to just click and try out a game, which was fine 10 years ago but only hurts that community today even if it's meant to be another 'pick up and write' easy to use program like Quest.

Marzipan wrote:Hard to recommend a game when you have to go 'but wait, first download this program...no THIS version not that one, then download the separate game file...' And that's more trouble than most people idly browsing the internet will be willing to put in for something they only have a mild spark of curiosity over.

While I agree almost entirely, regarding how poorly online IF games play, I couldn't agree more with this sentiment. Even I, as someone who played text adventures as a young teenager - and so hardly someone with a mere 'mild spark of curiosity' - will always look for a 'play online' link before anything else, purely for trial play purposes. I'll know almost immediately if a game interests me enough to want to download it, so without that ability to test a game I'll be far less inclined to do so.

Marzipan wrote:One of the biggest weaknesses of ADRIFT, IMO, is the lack of accessibility to new players there. There's nowhere on the not terribly inviting looking site to just click and try out a game, which was fine 10 years ago but only hurts that community today even if it's meant to be another 'pick up and write' easy to use program like Quest.

Actually there is, though it's not clearly labelled. If you go to the main site - http://www.adrift.co/games - you'll see a green triangle against some of the games. Click on that and you'll be able to play via the ADRIFT WebRunner. I always find the WebRunner a real eyesore and would recommend people download the games instead of playing them online, but at least it's an option if people want it.

The website definitely needs an update, though, to bring it kicking and screaming into the modern age - at the very least some indication that games can be played online. Quest's website is a heck of a lot nicer and much more inviting.