I’ve seen a lot of talk about converting ChoiceScript games to Twine, but nothing about converting CS to Ink. Why is this? Is it just because people don’t want to take the extra step in learning Godot or Unity or something like that?
I personally find Ink way nicer to work in than Twine, but I haven’t yet tried doing CS-style stats, with the fairmath and opposite pairs and the like. Wondering how hard that would be to do in, say, Atrament.
I’ve published an ink game, and have never touched Unity or Godot in my life – I don’t think you need anything but ink in order to write and publish an ink game?
On the other hand, I’m also not sure why I would want to convert a ChoiceScript game to ink. It’s already in the most portable format there is (html), and presumably, the game was designed with the ChoiceScript radio button list model in mind.
I can imagine someone getting halfway through building a big game in ChoiceScript and realizing they need some feature that CS doesn’t provide. That’s almost what happened with Loose Ends, but we discovered it more like 5% of the way through, so there wasn’t much to convert.
I converted a very big game from ChoiceScript to Ink and have talked about it elsewhere on this forum. The syntax is close enough that you can do it with several rounds of find-and-replace, though the resulting Ink script is functional rather than elegant. Things like stats would have to be redone from scratch, but my game didn’t make use of ChoiceScript stats, so that wasn’t a problem. I’ve since gone over all the code and improved it.
Yes, I wanted to add knowledge-chains and an inventory system using Ink’s lists, and since I didn’t need the CS stats the move seemed pretty obvious.
Atrament is very cool. I’m a new fan of Ink and Inky and I’m enjoying Rémy Vim’s template which has basically every CS feature.
I’m using a function for fairmath:
/* FairMath Increase Function */
=== function fm_plus(ref stat, percent) ===
~ stat = stat + (((100 - stat) * percent) / 100)
~ return
/* FairMath Decrease Function */
=== function fm_minus(ref stat, percent) ===
~ stat = stat - ((stat * percent) / 100)
~ return
// ~ fm_minus(HUN, 5)
// ~ fm_plus(HUN, 5)
Correct, though unless I’m mistaken (not unlikely, I’m pretty new) it would be hard to do a CS-like game with just pure Ink, as I don’t think you can do menus or anything like a stat page through there. Atrament though is pretty easy to use and allows that, but people just looking into Ink casually might not know tools like that exist.
Fair enough! I know a lot of people are going from CS → Twine because they want to own their own game without having to publish with Hosted Games, I would’ve thought some would move to Ink as well for similar reasons.
For me, I don’t think I’d convert a large game to Ink but I am interested in making an Ink game heavily inspired by CS and curious how the various features translate to Ink.
Never heard of it, I’ll have to look into it. Thanks!
Converting to Ink would allow you to then easily integrate the story into a game engine like Godot or Unity, with all the fancy modern video game features that entails. Can’t really do that easily with just HTML output.
But also, if nothing else, someone might want to convert from a proprietary format to something without any of the license restrictions imposed by Choice of Games.
For me it was a combination of things, wanting to learn Ink and use its more advanced features, the release of Atrament to provide a slick and attractive UI, and the realisation that my game was really not the type of thing CoG fans enjoy!
ChoiceScript has some great features such as statistics, and stat bars that display nicely, and great ways to gate and display choices. I really like the games but I always feel like I’m taking an SAT test and swiping the pages.
Ink I’ve found is delightful if you really like writing interactive conversations. Ink does a great job flowing vertically because the transcript cleans up after itself and can read like a prose story the player affected with their choices.
Ink is good to write in; Inky is better because you get side-by-side live coding and playing like the I7 IDE but updating mostly in real time and file management, along with some code-troubleshooting alerts. It’s like CSide but for Ink. It puts out a playable HTML. I have found myself falling into the “creative black hole” where time flies by when using Inky.
Ink also has third-party publishing templates such as Atrament and Rémy Vim’s - the latter is set up for powerful multimedia with images and sounds and popup alerts such as achievements that are not part of CSs model, and has a workflow where you just drop an updated .json into the file structure and add media to the assets folder for reference - zip the whole thing and host somewhere like itch.
