Yarn Spinner

Australian studio Secret Lab built Yarn Spinner in the mid-2010s, and its breakout came with Night in the Woods (2017), where every line of dialogue ran through it. A script consists of titled nodes, lines written as Name: text, options introduced with ->, and commands in <<double angle brackets>> that the game interprets itself — walk here, play an animation, fade out.

The difference from ink is mostly philosophical: Yarn Spinner thinks in nodes, like a dialogue graph, and integrates with Unity and Godot among others, while ink thinks in running text. The commands let a writer direct the scene without leaving the dialogue file — and let a programmer receive a bug report phrased as a line of dialogue.