ink VS blessed

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.

I found blessed but it seems like it was last updated 8 years ago. So what are my options?

So far I found this library github.com/chjj/blessed which is very powerful, I need to render animated charts and other complex objects and for my purpose it is doing well.

Alas https://github.com/chjj/blessed/issues/418#issuecomment-1533...

I considered blessed for a recent project, but ended up just simplifying the approach & making do with Inquirer + Meow instead due to the maintenance status. Haven't found anything else equivalent to blessed, other than Ink.

Inquirer is still probably the library that is most similar, if you are looking for comparisons to existing tools. My goal was to create a set of tools that uses the terminal window for a single operation at a time. The UI providing as much contextual information as possible to the user to know what actions they can perform, and any relevant information. A bit like a "choose your adventure" via terminal app sort of thing. Explicitly trying to stay clear of full screen and dashboard type stuff, like what blessed provides.

Not exactly a shell scripting framework, but y’all should check out blessed js. Weirdly enough I just found it yesterday and shit goes absolutely wild in the terminal

Perhaps you’d like a terminal based UI? https://github.com/chjj/blessed

You can build them from scratch, or use one of many specialized libraries on NPM, like commander, yargs, blessed, terminal kit, prompts, and many more.

This is where libraries come in: https://github.com/chjj/blessed - this allows you to manage rendering in the terminal on your own, so you can have a scrolling box of text at the top and a "command line" at the bottom.

I was hoping to write my app in Rust as a learning exercise, but my alternative is https://www.npmjs.com/package/blessed, which is NodeJS. Ah well.

Using this https://github.com/chjj/blessed