ink VS inform7-ide

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.

For those looking for Linux packages instead of compiling themselves, there's a github build project of an earlier version this year https://github.com/ptomato/inform7-ide/actions/runs/19915523...

Inform 7 is a domain-specific language for creating parser-based works of interactive fiction (i.e. old-school "text adventure games"). It does the heavy lifting of parsing and maintaining the consistency of the world model for the programmer.

Inform 7 takes this to the extreme, allowing code such as "A distance is a kind of value. 5 miles specifies a distance."

Pure parser-based games have become niche, but they are still out there and, like others mentioned, have continued to evolve (see Inform 7). You no longer have to "guess the verb".

Neat. Have you ever seen Inform? http://inform7.com/ Might offer some inspiration on future features. It's a pretty cool language that's been around for a long time and has the same use case.