ink VS Cradle

What does this have to do with Inkle's Ink? Well, Ink is a form of engine-agnostic game data creation. At heart, Ink is a narrative scripting language but because it was conceived as middleware, it can be used by many game development stacks. The primary integration is Unity which supports many platforms on its own but Ink scripts can also be run in the browser, Defold, Godot, Unreal and more. You can write Ink once, test it using Inky or Inklecate and deploy it using your desired framework. I can personally attest to running the same Ink script in the browser with ink.js and in the Defold, Godot and Unity game engines.

That's awesome, thanks!

I am aware of Inform 7, I think it is awesome. A few months ago I made a quick demo using Inklescript[1], which I found simpler and more suitable to my project (a Star Trek adventure). Inform 7 remains something I wish to explore in the future when I need something more complex.

Thanks! ;)

---

[1] https://www.inklestudios.com/ink/

As others have said, Twine is really a great starting point for text or choice-based games. If you'd like to get into the weeds a little more, I'd also shout out Ink, which is incredibly flexible and really fun imo, altho it def requires a bit more coding experience.

On the technology side, you might want to check out Inkle: https://www.inklestudios.com/ink/

Start writing in ink or twine.

Otherwise, Inkle is also quite good. (and people have made players for it in Unreal and Unity, so it's not hard to attach to existing game projects.) I don't think it has the nifty visual flowchart though, if that's a piece you care about.

I really like Ink. The developers made tons of games with it like the Sorcery! series, so it has a good foundation, and it's quite easy to write and organize, more than twine in my opinion.

Twine is nice, I am using it to create the story for a game with visual novel elements in Unity.

I'm using a heavily modified version of Cradle[0] and it works great.

However, I personally had a bad experience while trying to contribute to Twine. I encountered a severe bug that made me lose all my stories and only happens if you have Twine in another language than English. I read the code, identified the issue, wrote a detailed issue and sent a PR[1]. I got no answer until a year later saying "not applicable anymore" since the app basically got a rewrite.

At least I'm happy a lot of it got rewritten however it still seems as unstable as before, with random crashes and stories that can disappear on their own.

[0] https://github.com/daterre/Cradle

But apparently people have made plugins to do it with vanilla twine too.