For authors

Turn your interactive fiction into its own app, under your name, with your own look.

If you've written a parser game, The Golden Lanthorn can become your app: your title, your cover, your icon, ready to sell on itch.io, Steam, the App Store or Google Play, for Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS and Android. Underneath it's the same engine as every other game it plays — the map that draws itself, hints, saves and a turn-by-turn history you can rewind — wearing your game's own look.

If that sounds interesting, get in touch.

What story formats are supported

Games written in Inform 6 or Inform 7 (Z-machine and Glulx), and ZIL, built with ZILF, including graphics and sound through Blorb.

It doesn't play TADS, Hugo, ADRIFT or AGT games, or choice-based games made with Twine or Ink.

Terms

By arrangement. Tell us about your game and where you'd like it to end up, and we'll go from there.

The free option

The Lanthorn TUI underneath is free and open source, under the BSD-3-Clause licence. If you're comfortable building and packaging it yourself, nothing stops you using it for your game at no cost. What we offer on top of that is the finished app: the packaging, your own icon and cover, a store listing, and our help getting there.

Your game stays yours

We don't ask for any rights to your game. The app just plays your story file; the story, and everything in it, stays yours.

Get in touch

Email hello@goldenlanthorn.com. Tell us about your game, which system it's written in, and where you plan to sell it.