ink (inkle)
More info
- Creator
- inkle
- Type
- Narrative scripting language
- License
- MIT
- Source
- github.com/inkle/ink
A markup language for branching text in which the script reads like prose and the logic takes up as few characters as possible.
British studio inkle built ink for its own games — 80 Days, Sorcery!, Heaven's Vault — and open-sourced it in 2016. A story is split into knots and stitches; * starts a choice, + a choice that can be taken repeatedly, and -> diverts elsewhere. Variables, conditionals and counters for how often a line has been seen are built in.
Scripts compile to JSON read by a small runtime; the official one is C# for Unity, and inkjs runs the same files in a browser. The engine asks the runtime for the next line and the available choices, then decides for itself how to present them. That split is what lets writers work without touching game code.