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Very cool, how does it compare to [1] Twine?

[1] https://twinery.org/




I played around with it a bit a few years ago, not affiliated.

Ink is a markup language rather than an engine, so it plays nice with version control and managing huge stories. It also lets you handle variables and do some pretty complex logic inside the scripts.

This also this means you can integrate it with different workflows, dialog authors can editor and focus on dialog in the inkle editor. Then push their changes into a game built in Unity.

Definitely more suited to big teams than Twine which is more targeted at solo indie devs.


In my estimation it's apples and oranges. When it comes to game logic, Twine is basically just a platform for running JavaScript.

Ink, on the other hand, is a scripting language, and although you can play raw Ink scripts, it's really designed to integrate into graphical games (after all, it's what powers all of Inkle's games). I'd say in the IF world, it's much closer to Inform 7 than Twine.


IIRC, Ink is for embedding into a larger game to handle the narrative, whereas Twine is for making standalone games.


That is how I recently encountered Ink, disassembling the Unity code for Haven [0]!

Turns out the savegames are just encrypted JSON with a hardcoded key, and for debugging purposes, the game even allows loading unencrypted JSON!

This, and setting a specific flag in the .dll to unlock developer mode, allowed me to a developer menu to replay a few scenes that I missed (but wasn't going to replay a ~20h game for).

First time in a long while where I had fun disassembling and debugging outside of work.

[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/983970/Haven/


Might be closer to https://yarnspinner.dev ?




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