Alpha testers wanted for a new CYOA tool from inkle

Technical Development Interpreters
1

Hey all,

Over at inkle we’re trying to put together a web-tool for writing interactive stories using a CYOA-style paradigm. It’s aimed for non-programmer, entry-level users - we’d quite like to get it into schools, for instance - but it might provide a good starting point to get people interested in writing interactively, before they move on to the Inform 7 and Varytale’s of this world. (It’s more-or-less the same as Adventure Book from many moons ago, which is kinda ironic.)

We’re approaching an alpha version: doesn’t look too shiny, but it has all the right buttons.

We could use some people to test it - see if you get it, see if you like it, see if you can crash it. Anyone interested?

There’s a screenshot (of what it will look like, rather than what it does look like right now…) up on our website if you want to get a sense of the thing:

inklestudios.com/for-writers
inklestudios.com/for-teachers

If you’re interested, please drop me a line on jon@inklestudios.com – and if any of you are/know any teachers who might be interested in using such a thing, feel free to forward on the link / my email address.

cheers!
jon

2

Isn’t Varytale dead? The last communication I can find from the team was in August… twitter.com/#!/Varytale

Anyway, the inklewriter sounds neat!

3

Varytale is not dead, but is doing a bunch of private beta work at the moment.

4

That’s good to hear! 4 or 5 months is an eternity in Internet time, so I’m glad that they’re just hunkered in the bunker.

5

You have written inkle is not a self-publishing platform so what do you plan to do with the tool? Create a platform, sell it, give it away for free or even opensource it?

6

Hey, sorry for the long delay in replying!

Answer - not quite sure. It’s free to use, and it’ll be free to share games made with it - they’ll be playable in a browser. By “not self-publishing”, we mean we won’t be offering a “turn your stories into things you can sell” service - so we won’t be offering a “make them into apps” service.

Open-sourcing it is something we’re talking about and it’s an interesting idea. Lots of pros/cons to consider!

cheers
jon