80 Days, Heaven’s Vault and the Sorcery! games were all created by Inkle using their own scripting language, called Ink. It’s a powerful tool for creating game narrative using simple markup rather than code, and it’s open source so it can be used by other developers.
One drawback thus far has been that there was no native integration with the Unreal engine. That has now changed thanks to a new open source plug-in created by The Chinese Room.
Nick Slaven, who is technical director at the Chinese Room, announced an Unreal Engine plugin called Inkpot earlier this week. It’s open source and downloadable via Github. Specifically, it allows Ink to work with Unreal’s Blueprints visual scripting system.
Ink has long had native Unity support and has been used by developers on recent games such as Sable, Goodbye Volcano High, and the upcoming Thirsty Suitors. It also has its own dedicated editor, Inky, with which you can write and test your own stories. If you have any interest in video game narrative, I’d recommend messing around with it some rainy Sunday.
I have no idea if The Chinese Room are currently using Ink for their own projects, which include the recently re-announced Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2, but frankly why else would they make this.
This plugin may also be of interest to developers who recently learned that they never want to work with Unity ever again.
