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Ink – Scripting language for interactive stories

inklestudios.com

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Re: Ink – Scripting language for interactive stories

#3

Post by foopod »

gitgud wrote: post #2

Very cool, how does it compare to [1] Twine? [1] https://twinery.org/

I played around with it a bit a few years ago, not affiliated.

Ink is a markup language rather than an engine, so it plays nice with version control and managing huge stories. It also lets you handle variables and do some pretty complex logic inside the scripts.

This also this means you can integrate it with different workflows, dialog authors can editor and focus on dialog in the inkle editor. Then push their changes into a game built in Unity.

Definitely more suited to big teams than Twine which is more targeted at solo indie devs.

Re: Ink – Scripting language for interactive stories

#5

Post by usdivad »

Jon Ingold (inkle's narrative director) has a great talk on game dialogue [1] -- he implements a scene from Blade Runner in Ink. Super insightful and entertaining.

I've been using Ink a lot lately and really appreciate the work the community has put into it! Our team released a suite of interactive songs [2] last year -- we used Ink (and its handy Unity integration) to implement the core mechanic of two-player lyric choices in real-time, and even used it to handle some truth table logic for the credits :)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vRfNtvFVRo [2] http://evergreenblues.com/

Re: Ink – Scripting language for interactive stories

#6

Post by indigochill »

gitgud wrote: post #2

Very cool, how does it compare to [1] Twine? [1] https://twinery.org/

In my estimation it's apples and oranges. When it comes to game logic, Twine is basically just a platform for running JavaScript.

Ink, on the other hand, is a scripting language, and although you can play raw Ink scripts, it's really designed to integrate into graphical games (after all, it's what powers all of Inkle's games). I'd say in the IF world, it's much closer to Inform 7 than Twine.

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