I heard the name Jon Ingold a while back because I wanted to do something with their company's Inkle system, which is a tool for interactive fiction and dialogue trees.
This talk of his https://youtu.be/_vRfNtvFVRo is about how to do dialogues in games properly, and is very entertaining to watch.
He rewrites the scene from Blade Runner where Deckard meets Rachel into a dialogue tree where all the choices are meaningful and there aren't any "right" and "wrong" choices.
The interview made me want to try Inkle out as well, he has a very keen eye for what engages people and I wish that approach was more common in video game writing in general.
Some narrative-driven adventure game with some light RPG elements.
I came across Ink because I imagined that integrating some concepts from old Adventure Game Books might make for richer role-playing experiences than we typically see in mainstream RPGs.
Then I discovered that Inkle's own Sorcery! games already did all of that, and it did actually provide for a rich role-playing experience where your choices matter.
Rock Paper Shotgun had an article "How Little Choices Make Sorcery! Feel Epic" [0] that I came across in my research that explains better than I could why their system works so well.
ChoiceScript [1] and Yarnspinner [2] are two other tools I looked at.
It never got off the ground though. I see GitHub is hosting a game-jam in November. Perhaps it would be an opportunity to revisit the idea (depending on the theme)...
Before Inkle, Jon was the primary writer and developer behind a well-received (highly regarded) commercial parser-based story game, The Shadow in the Cathedral.
Ingold is a great game designer. Fail-Safe is a classic and he's been working and building for so many years now, just getting better and more creative IMO. Inkle puts out some great stuff and open source tech (Ink) too.
This talk of his https://youtu.be/_vRfNtvFVRo is about how to do dialogues in games properly, and is very entertaining to watch.
He rewrites the scene from Blade Runner where Deckard meets Rachel into a dialogue tree where all the choices are meaningful and there aren't any "right" and "wrong" choices.
Here's another of his talks in my YouTube history: https://youtu.be/UXY8fhL1fxk