[wernsey]

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.

Here's another of his talks in my YouTube history: https://youtu.be/UXY8fhL1fxk

[nupitalnumber]

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.

What sort of game were you thinking of making?

[wernsey]

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)...

[0]: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/how-little-choices-make-sor... [1]: https://github.com/dfabulich/choicescript [2]: https://yarnspinner.dev/