inklewriter, you all should be interested.

no, really.
One day we all will remind this very moment.

Nice job people!

writer.inklestudios.com/

Pretty slick! But this really looks as if the idiom is mostly about making traditional stateless CYOA in a slicker, prettier format.

So, pretty attractive to me as a reader: I expect some fine things to come out of this. As an author, it feels like it’s moving in totally the wrong direction from Undum. That’s probably because I occupy a strange little niche that IF has traditionally served very well, in between the Real Programmers and the Allergic To Code. Non-sucky tools for the latter are a big deal! Just one that would frustrate the everliving crap out of me if I tried to use them.

(Edit: possibly the stuff I want is going in later, or I’m missing it somehow; now that I look elsewhere I’m seeing things that suggest that state-tracking, variable text etc. is intended to be possible.)

A full suite of state logic is ready and built, we’re just finishing off making the interface for it lovely. Having memory and state tracking is definitely important to the kind of stories we want to encourage. But the UI has got to be spot on since this is where the complexity really comes in. So, watch this space and once that stuff goes live we’ll definitely be keen on hearing how people find it.

Jon

Ok, NOW I’m interested.

This really looks good, and while I’m usually no big fan of “click around and enter bits of code and settings all over the place” rather than “it’s all just code that goes in text files”, this GUI really makes sense.

Neat thing: if you haven’t finished something and you try to play through it in read mode, when you drive off the map you just get an empty page saying “this page intentionally left blank”, and a button that lets you keep editing right where you are. Really nice.

Now I’m just waiting for the state variables, without it is still too limited, even if it’s really well made.

Oh, and it looks crap on an iPhone but seems to work on an iPad.

Editing on an iPhone may never look good. iPad will get a bit slicker soon. Sharing stories on an iPhone is a fix that’s incoming even as I don’t do it because I’m answering this.

cheers!
jon

…and that’s done. Android phones should now work okay too.

jon

Conditionals just went live. inklewriter is now smart.

As a basic, you add markers to paragraphs of text, and then can test if those markers have been seen / not seen, and turn on and off paragraphs and/or options on the basis of that. You can also do conditional text inline, in an Inform-7-ish kinda way.

More powerfully, you can declare variables by setting a marker of “value = 3”, and increment/decrement them with simple instructions (“value + 2”, “value - 2”). You can test for equality, and the usual orderings (>, <, <=, >=).

Conditionals can be strung together using and’s and not’s.

Here’s an example of the thing in action: a first chapter of “The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual” by Arthur Conan Doyle.

writer.inklestudios.com/stories/musgraveritual

Have fun!

cheers
jon

Just to be clear, you can’t make inline hyperlinked choices in inklewriter, can you?

You can’t right now, no, though you’re the second person who’s asked for it so we may add it as a kind of plugin - like, you mark up the text in the paragraph, make an option with the same text, and it renders it as a link.

My biggest concern with that is slightly subtle: because of the way paragraphs can join back together, a set of options could potentially have several different paragraphs preceding it, and it might be hard for the author to ensure that every option they provide actually has the relevant link preceding it. (I suppose if it didn’t, we’d just not render a link for that option, though).

Quick question, though: do you see advantages over hyperlinks compared to something like:

“The baseball crowd are going wild as Pitcher Bill steps up to the plate”
→ (Crowd)
→ (Pitcher Bill)

…with options below referencing text above. (And excuse me, I know nothing about baseball).

I always find hyperlinks cause me to break flow when reading but that might just be me.

cheers
jon

Well, for my idiosyncratic purposes, I don’t think it would work as well; I’m thinking of a stream of consciousness project where you could click on any of several highlighted words to get something related to it, somehow. It feels like having a list of keywords after the paragraph would break up the flow of the prose. So if I had something like:

I wouldn’t want an enormous list of keywords after this (this may be overboard with the choices anyway, though the idea is that many of them go to the same place no matter where they’re linked from to avoid combinatorial explosion a bit.

I also think something like the examine links in Deirdra Kiai’s The Play work better inline (the ones where you click on a character’s name and get some info about it), though those wouldn’t work in inkle without some major fiddling, would they? If I’m not mistaken, the links have to attach to the current paragraph.

It may sound like I have Undum envy, and that’s probably true, but I can’t make head or tail of Undum. :blush:

(Nothing wrong with the example, except that pitchers are usually terrible at hitting, and in Americanese mass nouns like “crowd” take singular verbs.)

That’s a fair example of where hyperlinks work better, yeah. Well. We may add an extension to give you the option, since it’s only a change to way the story is rendered, not the way that it’s written. If we do, I’ll let you know!

Jon