I’ve recently launched VisualInk (which I’m not allowed to link to yet, but a quick search for ‘mavnn’ and ‘visualink’ should lead you there if you’re interested). It’s a website for writing, prototyping, and publishing simple visual novels. It’s aimed primarily at first time coders and I’m using it to run after school and home education classes, but the visual novels are written in Ink so it could also be of interest to people who’d like to quickly test more complex story ideas out without having to worry about presentation.
I’d love feedback in general, but I’d especially love to speak to teachers who have an interest in using IF in the classroom environment and what tools like this need to support to be practically useful for you - either as an authoring tool or to create teaching materials with an interactive twist. If you fall in to that camp and you’d be willing to have a chat, please reach out.
I’m not really a Visual Novel person, but I do like to see people making new Ink-powered creation tools. I love that you can do this sort of thing so easily with Ink.
Yes, that’s correct. “Narrator” is a magic speaker name which removes the current speaker image.
Coming real soon now™ will be a short intro video and document that match the introduction I give at the beginning of the course. I experimented with inline comments in the script explaining all the options, but it just came across as very overwhelming for people who weren’t used to ‘annotated’ text already.
Is there any way to dabble in it without creating an account? I ask not because I’m concerned about doing so myself, but as a teacher; if using this with students requires them to create an account, I have to go through a potentially weeks-long approval process with our IT team and our data protection manager, whereas if I can just point them at a website then they can start playing around and making stuff even if they can’t keep anything permanently without signing up.
So there’s two levels to answering that, I suppose.
First level: I could add “transient” sessions (like the demo page but with the ability to run stuff) that offers you a ‘magic url’ and deletes your work after some time. I hadn’t prioritized that because I had thought that the disappearing aspect would put people off, but if you’re telling me it would be useful it wouldn’t be that hard.
Second level: The longer term goal is to have internal group support and/or Google Classroom integration so that only the teacher has to set up an account, and then they issue invite links that effectively operate within “their space”. This means that the class share images available and things, and also means the teacher can be confident people aren’t building anything too inappropriate. This I haven’t got to yet, and I’d probably need to make a paid feature if it became even vaguely popular but that’s a future concern (and I’m really hoping individual accounts will always be free). Would that actually work for you as a classroom teacher, ignoring the cost aspect for now?
Depending on your own background there is also always the nuclear option of just running the code yourself locally, but… I’m not expecting that to be a popular choice, I have to admit.
Is it possible to add “transient sessions” with an option for local save? Then, students could submit a file to the teacher so that they could evaluate what they’ve done. Being able to reupload it to continue editing it would be great, too. See snap.berkeley.edu for an example of what I mean by this—you can play around all you’d like, and download/upload programs from your computer, but creating an account enables cloud saving as well.
That would actually be trivial, so long as the transient sessions are limited to only using the pre-provided assets. The main reason for the accounts existing is really about asset management more than script management, to be honest.
I’ll do a bit of design noodling over the weekend and see if I can think of ways to make the trial experience nicer.
At the moment there’s no “shared space” to put assets if you don’t have an account. There’s system wide assets (which as a site that has under 18s as part of the target audience, I’m fixing in advance), and user assets. Remember that part of the idea here is that stories can be published on the site, so the actual asset management and game play is happening server side, not via ink-js which would be the obvious way to do it for a straight authoring tool.
There are, obviously, ways I could change the design to work around that but I’m not totally sure if that’s a good direction to go in. There are already ways to run Ink stories in your local browser without a server at all which might be a better bet at that point.
Regarding the issue of assets, it looks like you’re including the music of Liborio Conti in your shared asset pool, and I’m not sure that’s actually allowed under his weird bespoke license?
The license says that you can use the music in “projects,” but also “this license expressly forbids the resale, re–licensing, or other distribution of my music, either as is, or any modification thereof,” and also that “you may not re–sell or ‘loan’ my music to others.” Frankly, it’s very unclear what is and isn’t allowed, which is why basically everyone knowledgeable on the subject recommends not using a weird bespoke license. (EDIT: Wow, the auto-translate widget on Conti’s website even applies to the license! In what world is that a good idea? You can get the license in a nonsensical tortured mix of English and Latin if you want.)
The most obvious alternative (who you might already be aware of) is Kevin MacLeod of incompetech.com, who has released a ton of music under the CC-BY 4.0 license.
I’ll definitely look into that. I may also just contact Liborio directly to see if he’s willing to give written permission to use the works in this context, pointing out that the non-standard license is making it harder than needed.
@jwalrus you should now be able to edit the script at Edit Script | Visual Ink and run the changes without logging in. It’s now also possible to browse (but not change) the shared assets at /speakers, /scenes and /music without logging in to see what’s available to play with. Which is… not too much at the moment, but I needed the site to function before putting too much time into building the library.