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Ink is inkle's scripting language for writing interactive narrative, both for text-centric games as well as more graphical games that contain highly branching stories. It's designed to be easy to learn, but with powerful enough features to allow an advanced level of structuring.

Here's a taster from the tutorial.

- I looked at Monsieur Fogg 
*   ... and I could contain myself no longer.
    'What is the purpose of our journey, Monsieur?'
    'A wager,' he replied.
    * *     'A wager!'[] I returned.
            He nodded. 
            * * *   'But surely that is foolishness!'
            * * *  'A most serious matter then!'
            - - -   He nodded again.
            * * *   'But can we win?'
                    'That is what we will endeavour to find out,' he answered.
            * * *   'A modest wager, I trust?'
                    'Twenty thousand pounds,' he replied, quite flatly.
            * * *   I asked nothing further of him then[.], and after a final, polite cough, he offered nothing more to me. <>
    * *     'Ah[.'],' I replied, uncertain what I thought.
    - -     After that, <>
*   ... but I said nothing[] and <> 
- we passed the day in silence.
- -> END

Getting started

Download Inky, our ink editor, and the follow either:

For those who are very technically-minded, you can also use inklecate directly, our ink command line compiler (and player).

To keep up to date with the latest news about ink sign up for the mailing list.

Writing with Unity

Ink, Inky, ink-unity-integration, inkjs, inklecate, inkle oh my!

What you need if you are a:

Versioning

The intention is the following:

Advanced: Using inklecate on the command line

Integrating into your game

Full article: see Running Your Ink.

For a sample Unity project, see The Intercept.

Ink comes with a C#-based (or JavaScript-based runtime engine that can load and run a compiled ink story in JSON format.

To compile the ink, either export from Inky (File -> Export to JSON). Or if you're using Unity, you can use the ink-unity-integration package which will automatically compile your ink for you whenever you edit it either in Inky or in an editor of your choice.

Advanced: You can also use the inklecate command line tool to compile ink stories, or you can call the compiler from C# code yourself.

ink isn't designed as an end-to-end narrative game engine. Rather, it's designed to be flexible, so that it can slot into your own game and UI with ease. Here's a taster of the code you need to get started:

using Ink.Runtime;

// 1) Load story
_story = new Story(sourceJsonString);

// 2) Game content, line by line
while(_story.canContinue)
    Debug.Log(story.Continue());

// 3) Display story.currentChoices list, allow player to choose one
Debug.Log(_story.currentChoices[0].text);
_story.ChooseChoiceIndex(0);

// 4) Back to 2
...

The development of ink

Build Requirements

All Environments:

Windows (Optional):

Mac (Optional):

Building with Visual Studio

  1. Load up the solution file - ink.sln.
  2. Select the Release configuration and choose Build -> Build All (or Build Solution in Visual Studio).
  3. The compiler binary should be built in inklecate/bin/Release (or x86), while the runtime engine DLL will be built in ink-engine-dll/bin/Release/ink-engine.dll

Building with command-line

  1. cd to the project you want to build (e.g., cd inklecate)
  2. Build using dotnet: dotnet build -c Release
  3. To run console apps: dotnet run -c Release
    • To produce self-contained executable: dotnet publish -r win-x64 -c Release --self-contained
    • Recommended RIDs for the platform (-r) are: win-x64, linux-x64, and osx-x64

To run the binaries, you need to install .NET Runtime 6.0 or newer (included in SDK).

Need help?

How to contribute

We’d of course appreciate any bug fixes you might find - feel free to submit a pull request. However, usually we're actively working on a game, so it might take a little while for us to take a look at a non-trivial pull request. Apologies in advance if it takes a while to get a response!

Architectural overview

See the architectural overview documentation for information about the pipeline of the ink engine, and a birds-eye view of the project's code structure.

License

ink is released under the MIT license. Although we don't require attribution, we'd love to know if you decide to use ink a project! Let us know on Twitter or by email.

Support us!

ink is free forever, but represents multiple years of thought, design, development and testing. Please consider supporting us via Patreon. Thank you, and have fun!