Ink by Inkle

ink is a scripting language built around the idea of marking up pure-text with flow in order to produce interactive scripts.

At its most basic, it can be used to write a Choose Your Own-style story, or a branching dialogue tree. But its real strength is in writing dialogues with lots of options and lots of recombination of the flow.

ink offers several features to enable non-technical writers to branch often, and play out the consequences of those branches, in both minor and major ways, without fuss.

The script aims to be clean and logically ordered, so branching dialogue can be tested "by eye". The flow is described in a declarative fashion where possible.

ink - the language • Markup, not programming: Text comes first, code and logic are inserted within. • Simple, elegant syntax: Why not get a taste in the writing tutorial? • Proven: literally millions of words of content have been written for our own games. • Easy to learn, but with powerful constructs for more advanced scripting. • Conceived as middleware: a narrative engine designed to slot into a game engine.

What's the difference between inklewriter and ink? • inklewriter is an easy-to-use online tool to write basic interactive stories. • ink by comparison is a more powerful narrative scripting language that is primarily designed for professional game development, though it can also be used to write and share choice-based interactive fiction. It is also surprisingly easy to learn, though for ease of use it's hard to beat inklewriter!

Ink, Inky, inkle, inklewriter • Ink is the core narrative engine itself, written in C#. It includes the code for the compiler. If you're not technical, you don't need to worry about this. • Inky is our ink editor, which is a text editor with support for playing as you write. If you're just starting out with ink, this is all you need. • inkle is the game development studio that created ink • inklewriter is an unrelated interactive story creation tool that designed to be easy to use, but is far less powerful. It's possible to export inklewriter stories to ink, but not vice versa.

Unity Integration The plugin provides you with everything you need to get started with ink in Unity. It automatically recompiles ink files as you edit them, and even comes with a simple previewer that lets you play stories directly within the Editor, without writing a line of code.