Ian Thomas

@jon.inkle.co It reached Sweden. :-)

Note that I totally failed to hit the brief here and so said more than one thing. Ah well!

(Good stuff in this book. Lots of good juicy crunchiness, in fact. From a lot of familiar names!)

📖 THE GAME NARRATIVE KALEIDOSCOPE ❄️ is out NOW!

www.inklestudios.com/kaleidoscope

100+ essays on writing & narrative design, with articles from the writers of Baldur's Gate 3, Control, Call of Duty, Prince of Persia, Tomb Raider, Sam and Max...

ALSO the Kaleidoscope Podcast with 2 full eps!

Ah, shit... woke up in a mysterious and abandoned location, and I've lost my memory. I hope a series of gradually escalating challenges positioned between me and escape can instruct me how to open doors, use my powers, and double jump.

I've collected some tools and articles here, as it's all getting a bit messy.

storytools.se

Dinky Feature: Scratch Audio TL;DR —in Dinky you can record temp audio for each line of your script.

New feature for Dinky (the dialogue Ink editor) - record scratch audio for each line while in the editor, and be notified when it goes out of date.

medium.com/@wildwinter/...

I've collected some tools and articles here, as it's all getting a bit messy.

storytools.se

Dinky Feature: Scratch Audio TL;DR —in Dinky you can record temp audio for each line of your script.

New feature for Dinky (the dialogue Ink editor) - record scratch audio for each line while in the editor, and be notified when it goes out of date.

medium.com/@wildwinter/...

One think I have learned though (in other projects) is that the compiled Ink is useful, but combining it with the raw source file gives you way more useful data.

Sure - it's still baby steps and will undoubtedly have missed a bunch of edge cases. I think if you're trying to introspect the Ink structure itself there are maybe better versions out there.

bsky.app/profile/wild...

Horses/courses, and I'll continue noodling away at things which make my life slightly easier. :-) Definitely not saying "This is the way!" because for many people or even different projects, it's not. But the more that's in the ecosystem, the better, IMO.

Ink as a flow tool I really like, though. And the runtime side of it is really good, way better than some solutions that try to fill a similar gap and have different authoring approaches.

I'm not a fan of node-based myself, really. But I have other people who much prefer to consume things that way.

These definitely use Ink in different ways for different reasons, some of which restrict its inherent power. And there are other solutions and other engines out there.

And having a bunch of tools in the toolbox are handy. It's why Ink-Tester exists, to do some brute force "did this line ever get hit?" analysis. And why Ink-Localiser exists, which only makes sense if you don't glue together lines. And why Dinky exists, to deal with spoken dialogue lines.

Interesting feedback on "but this doesn't make sense for use with Ink" and that's true, for a bunch of 'proper' uses of Ink it's not necessarily useful. Mostly this is me noodling to see what tools I can build, but a lot of ways Ink is being used now is not necessarily what Ink was designed for.

A bit more acceptable I think.

Updated - tested the new version with 1000 knots and 1500 stitches and it seemed to survive.

For example, we use Ink for spoken dialogue. Which it *really* wasn't designed for.

By which I mean - a lot of people are using Ink to solve problems it wasn't written for as we're often short of better solutions. The thing I made is to address some pain points caused by that misuse.

Ink is made for non-graph, for sure. But we definitely have use cases (and I know others do) where it's not being used like that, as it's a better solution for more basic narrative logic flow than a lot of other things. A misuse of Ink, really, but because it *is* being used, this helps.

That looks very comprehensive!

Still work in progress really, figuring out what I need from it. If there's something missing, let me know!

bsky.app/profile/wild...

Looking promising...

Working on some optimisations for what I call "The @richardcobbett.bsky.social Effect"

(I fully expect teething probs, it's all very new.)

I imagine your script is rather large! But drop me a test case if you have a chance and I'll see what I can do. Or at least give me some numbers - count of knots or something?

Visualising the Flow: Ink Explorer TL;DR — A tool for stepping through Ink visually and keeping track of variables.

Another tool! Ink Explorer.

Visualises the shape of an Ink story and lets you play through from any point, watching variables (and tweaking them), keeping track of visit counts, and letting you snapshot and restore the state.

Early days - hope it's useful to someone!

medium.com/@wildwinter/...