[HN Gopher] Writing web-based interactive fiction with Ink
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Writing web-based interactive fiction with Ink
Author : Tomte
Score : 71 points
Date : 2021-04-29 18:48 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.inklestudios.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.inklestudios.com)
| Kinrany wrote:
| Previous thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26761100
|
| More past threads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26763071
| helloworld11 wrote:
| No thank you. Their interface is nearly garbage when it comes to
| smooth writing and even worse, that they obligate users to create
| an account only through the options of their Google account or
| their Facebook account is simply unforgivable. It's bad enough
| that Ink itself almost certainly scans all compositions by users
| for data mining purposes, but to have to then also know that the
| whole process needs to be done through logins via these two giant
| personal information parasites is a whole second level of
| shitting on customers.
| mattbee wrote:
| This is nonsense on toast.
|
| Ink is open source, and they run an instance of the editor etc
| so you can try it out and publish your own compositions (like
| Twine).
|
| It's a games company trying to make better storytelling tech,
| they're not data mining anything.
| tene80i wrote:
| Where does it say anything about creating an account via Google
| or FB? Or creating an account at all? (Except for on itch.io,
| which is a suggestion for hosting rather than Ink itself, and
| also doesn't seem to require Google or FB).
| fudged71 wrote:
| Let's say I wanted the user to import a standardized CSV of their
| progress (in something like learning, fitness, finances, etc).
|
| Is there a way you could easily set the Ink variables based on
| that input and then create a story (of possible paths forward)
| from that current state?
| haram_masala wrote:
| Related topic: how can a writer monetize their interactive
| fiction?
| tobr wrote:
| This is a skill that _should_ be very valuable to pretty much
| any product design team, even outside games. Tech products are
| mostly UI, and UI is mostly interactive text. For some reason
| UI /UX design teams tend to be run by people who think visually
| or technically, with writing as an afterthought. I think the
| very specific skills required to write good IF would improve
| almost any UI, and there's probably more money in that career
| than in a career writing IF.
| indigochill wrote:
| The same way Inkle does: make a game and sell it.
|
| Ink in particular (as opposed to, say, Inform7) is strong here
| because it already supports Unity integration. Heaven's Vault
| was developed with Ink, and that's a 3D adventure game that
| happens to have its story branches managed by Ink but the user
| experience is far from typical IF fare.
|
| But you can even make commercial parser games. Anchorhead and
| Hadean Lands are two relatively recent examples.
| anthk wrote:
| Commercial parser? Hadean Lands and Anchorhead (the
| commercial edition) are just gblorb/glulx, a rehash of the
| Z-Machine with 32 bit capabilities.
|
| Said this, I'd like people knew Inform6 more, among IBG.pdf
| (Inform's Beginner Guide) and DM4.pdf (Inform6's manual).
|
| The language is dumb easy. It's object oriented (almost
| literally, you declare in-game objects as... objects with
| properties), and the games can be run on legacy machines
| fastly, such as Amiga/Atari/68k Macs.
|
| Here's an Inform6 libre game to start with:
|
| http://www.amirrorclear.net/flowers/game/devours/
|
| Also, I forgot: There's Puny Inform, a reduced subset from
| Inform6 with few changes here and there in order to create
| games targetting the 3th version of the Z-machine. Thus, the
| games will run anywhere, even on the C64, Spectrum, MSX, BBC,
| Linux, OSX, Windows... everywhere.
|
| https://github.com/johanberntsson/PunyInform
|
| Example on a commercial Z3 game:
|
| https://hlabrande.itch.io/tristam-island
|
| A libre one (Calypso):
|
| http://microheaven.com/ozmoo/games/calypso/calypso.z3
| https://github.com/dave-f/calypso
| fwip wrote:
| Commercial (parser games), not (commercial parser) games.
| xcambar wrote:
| I have some rather complex technical documentation and guides to
| write, and this strikes me as the perfect tool for this purpose.
|
| I'm starting over tomorrow.
| disposedtrolley wrote:
| Can you please report back on your progress? I love to see
| novel approaches to technical documentation that can make the
| content more digestible.
| mathgladiator wrote:
| I've had similar thoughts in the past with blogs. Make more
| controversial opinion pieces require readers to indicate their
| concern and feedback, and then address inline. This way, I can
| understand the percentage of readers that bounce after reading
| the headline or don't engage too deep.
| leafmeal wrote:
| Does anyone know of an examples of stories/games made with this?
| Not like a full on game like 80 Days, but something like what you
| could end up with after following the tutorial?
|
| I want to show this to a friend and I think an example would help
| give them an idea of what's possible.
|
| Edit: Someone wrote a "portfolio" for their personal website
| which is pretty cool
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26765367
|
| If anyone has any narrative examples that would be ideal.
| kej wrote:
| There are lots of examples of varying complexity on GitHub:
| https://github.com/search?q=extension%3Aink&type=code
|
| (A few of those are false positives because someone made a
| personal scripting language called Ink, but most of them appear
| to be the interactive fiction from this article)
| mwcampbell wrote:
| I'm happy to report that this Ink-based portfolio is accessible
| with a screen reader. I wonder if Inkle ever plans to switch to
| web technologies for their full-blown games, instead of
| embedding Ink in a game engine.
| Kinrany wrote:
| Ink distinguishes itself from other similar languages by having
| an ecosystem of libraries and tools, instead of being a single
| standalone editor.
| anthk wrote:
| TBH these games are just fancy CYOA books; a lot of them could be
| just edited as PDF/EPUBs with a little notebook aside and they
| could work the same.
|
| Text adventures offer far more depth and gameplay choices and
| freedom to roam aorund.
| endisneigh wrote:
| How do you handle the exponential growth of things you have to
| manage with these sort of things?
|
| I hear Bandersnatch had a huge issue editing and filming due to
| the same issue.
| rl3 wrote:
| The simple answer is very carefully.
|
| _Deus Ex_ (2000) had similar issues. The game 's story was
| originally intended to branch much harder than what actually
| shipped. Still, it's widely considered to be one of the best
| games ever made, owing in no small part to its emergent
| gameplay.
|
| I think we're going to be entering the era of emergent story
| soon. After all, _AI Dungeon_ exists today.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| I would hope the answer is, through more advanced building
| blocks - like _variables_ , _procedures_ , _functions_ ;
| through more advanced abstractions - like sequences,
| associative containers, maybe even state machines; through
| means of enforcing and verifying correctness - like a type
| system, or unit tests.
|
| Interactive fiction markup language _is a programming language_
| - just with a weird syntax that 's tuned for content-rich,
| control-poor programs. Kind of like SGML/XML is a format good
| for storing text-heavy, markup-lean data.
|
| The same is the case with an interactive movie script. In both
| cases, your story forms a directed graph[0], and the
| reader/viewer traverses it. But you don't have to, and
| shouldn't, write out the whole graph![1]
|
| Personally, when I see "managing complexity", I read "writing
| code". Because, once you look past all the minutiae of
| programming languages, build systems and computers, this is
| what programming is - managing complexity.
|
| I don't think everyone should be a programmer, but I do hope
| the _concepts_ used in software development will eventually
| become common knowledge.
|
| --
|
| [0] - Possibly infinite.
|
| [1] - For the same reason you don't put your whole program into
| main() and don't write out conditional jumps as your only
| control structure.
| steeleduncan wrote:
| The usual approach for managing complexity is to chop it up
| into storylets. Emily Short has written a lot about it on her
| blog [1]
|
| [1] https://emshort.blog
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