About Planedrift

Hi, I'm Ben. I made Planedrift to be a pleasant, modern way to play the Infocom adventures that meant so much to me when I was a kid — Zork, Hitchhiker's Guide, Wishbringer, and the rest. I wanted it to feel like a paperback you can carry around, pick up, read a few pages, and put down. Clean typography, calm colours, automatic saves, a scrollable and searchable transcript.

What's stored. Your saves and a few preferences (theme, todos for the current game) live in your browser's localStorage — nothing leaves your machine, and there are no accounts to make. Page-view counts go through GoatCounter, which doesn't use cookies or fingerprinting.

What isn't. Anything else. No server holding onto your games, no email list, no analytics on what you type or which rooms you visit. No-one will know if you get eaten by a grue.

Why is it called Planedrift? It's a domain name I had bought for a different project. But I think it fits pretty well.

What's next? One of the best things about building something for yourself is that you don't have to stick to a roadmap — let alone someone else's. Having said that, the obvious next stop is Z5 support, which unlocks most of the post-1985 Infocom catalogue plus a lot of modern PunyInform games. Beyond that I'd like to do a really good transcript export — handsome PDFs, Markdown, plain text — and maybe a way to peek at the InvisiClues hint files when you're stuck. Further out, Z8 and Glulx would open up most of the modern interactive-fiction world.

I occasionally blog about it and other projects on whitebeard.blog. It would make me extremely happy if you enjoy using Planedrift — you can tip me on Ko-fi if you'd like.

Colophon. Planedrift is built in Elm. It uses my own libraries — elm-zmachine and elm-zengine — and not a great deal else. Vite handles the build; the typefaces are Newsreader (serif), Work Sans (sans), and Pangolin (the handwritten font on the map). It's a pure front-end app hosted on Cloudflare Pages.