Gearing up to teach “Digital Storytelling” this summer. Not sure whether I have time to add this tool to the syllabus, but I’m definitely going to play with it.

ink is a scripting language built around the idea of marking up pure-text with flow in order to produce interactive scripts. At its most basic, it can be used to write a Choose Your Own-style story, or a branching dialogue tree. But its real strength is in writing dialogues with lots of options and lots of recombination of the flow.

ink offers several features to enable non-technical writers to branch often, and play out the consequences of those branches, in both minor and major ways, without fuss. The script aims to be clean and logically ordered, so branching dialogue can be tested “by eye”. The flow is described in a declarative fashion where possible. It’s also designed with redrafting in mind; so editing a flow should be fast. —Writing with Ink