Ink 1.0 – Open-source scripting language for interactive narrative

homepage.js is the translated Ink script after processing by inkjs (from Inkle)

ink.js is a bunch of Inkle magic

main.js has some custom choice behavior I wrote for things like opening browser tabs when you pick certain choices, as well as some other stuff.

I actually didn't commit the original Ink script to version control, and I'm kicking myself for that now.

> A race is a kind of person. Dwarf, elf, and half-elf are kinds of race.

> A town has numbers called friendliness, services, comfort, and population. Leadership relates a person to a town. The verb to lead implies the leadership relation. "F [friendliness] / S [services] / C [comfort] / P [population]".

> Rivalry relates various towns to each other. The verb to be rivals with implies the rivalry relation. The verb to be rivals of implies the rivalry relation.

Then you can make a town like this:

> Bremen is a town in Ten-Towns. "Founded by dwarf prospectors, the sleepy town of Bremen sits on the west bank of Maer Dualdon, at the mouth of the Shaengarne River.". It has friendliness 3. It has services 1. It has comfort 2. It has population 150.

> Dorbulgruf Shalescar is a dwarf. Bremen is led by Dorbulgruf Shalescar.

And now inform7 can be used to query or act on all this metadata:

> Every turn when the player is in a town: repeat with town running through towns: say "Rivals of [town]: [list of towns that are rivals with town][line break]";

This is the kind of thing you have to work hard to represent in ink because you only have functions, variables, and lists (a hashmap<variable, boolean>). As you add more metadata to inform7, it can make EXTREMELY sophisticated queries or conditions like "list of weapons that were in hidden rooms which are gilded". So for very little work, you can have inform7 reason about whether a player can 'wear' a specific item by checking what they're wearing, how the item affixes to things, and what attachment points you've defined (which can be as broad or granular as you want). And as a bonus, it's also very little code to comment on the player wearing a strange thing (like pants on their head) or wearing colours a specific character thinks clash with eachother.

This kind of query is one of ink's notable weaknesses (and requires quite a lot of lists or very clever lookup functions to achieve). But, ink can leverage its frontend (often a general purpose programming language like C# or javascript) to provide that functionality.

The main competition is Twine, which is more focused on a self-contained deployment. Twine also got a huge update recently with its "Harlowe" theme supporting storylets - scenes that trigger from a pool or "deck" based on logic you program.

Twine and "choice" games would say something like "you are in a room with a table and a door to the north. Do you want to look at the table or go to the door?"

Clicking on the little boxes with the word "snow." does nothing.