Ink – Scripting language for interactive stories
inklestudios.com
inklestudios.com
I've been using Ink a lot lately and really appreciate the work the community has put into it! Our team released a suite of interactive songs [2] last year -- we used Ink (and its handy Unity integration) to implement the core mechanic of two-player lyric choices in real-time, and even used it to handle some truth table logic for the credits :)
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vRfNtvFVRo [2] http://evergreenblues.com/
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.
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.
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.
299792 segmentation fault (core dumped)