smcamerons-python-adventure VS ink

I don't know if this counts, but I wrote a parser for "the ship's computer" in my game, "Space Nerds in Space". It's described here: https://scaryreasoner.wordpress.com/2016/05/14/speech-recogn...

I also wrote some toy "interactive fiction" things (with less sophisticated parsers) in python and Lua as a way to gain familiarity with those languages, not that they are very interesting in and of themselves, though they demonstrate a fairly standard technique behind these kinds of games in a compact way.

https://github.com/smcameron/smcamerons-python-adventure

https://github.com/smcameron/space-nerds-in-space/blob/maste...

Here's a trivial text adventure in python I made when I was starting to learn python: https://github.com/smcameron/smcamerons-python-adventure

The point though is to start with a very simple, well known, text only type of game, like interactive fiction or a "text adventure", or whatever they call Zork like games nowadays, which in its simplest incarnation is (or at least can be) pretty simple (i.e, mine is about 400 lines of Lua), but can be made arbitrarily more complex by adding new types of objects, object interactions, verbs, and sentence syntax that it can understand. It will give you a good feel for how to organize a Lua program, how to deal with data structures ("tables" in Lua), etc. It's simple enough, and being text only, you don't get caught up in details of the problem that don't actually have much to do with the language itself, but complex enough that you have to think a bit. I find it a good problem for new languages (I did the same thing when learning python.)

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! ;)

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[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.