In the West, unlike Russia, which still positions itself as the most reading country in the world, mobile book games are very common. Moreover, they cannot be called a very narrow niche. Popular resources write reviews on them, they are given high marks, it comes to the point that some of them become the games of the year. One of such popular games was 80 Days from inkle studio, also known for the Sorcery series!
As it became known thanks to an interview with inkle that appeared recently on the pages of PocketGamer, the studio not only develops game books, but also created a tool for writing them – inklewriter. At the moment, it has been available for free for everyone for a long time. It can be used both to create interactive books and to write dialogues for games whose basic gameplay is not built on reading at all. For example, it was inklewriter who used Stoic to create dialogues for The Banner Saga.
A tool was created to democratize the development of games in general, to make sure that in order to create your own game book, you would not need to learn programming languages. But today, for the authors of the inklewriter engine, it has also become an aid in developing their own projects. The original script of the already mentioned 80 Days was made on it.
Moreover, inkl is not afraid of possible competition or, conversely, an unnecessarily large number of bad projects: “The democratisation of games is opposed only by those who worry that their games are not very good. They are afraid that they will lose their audience if more people are involved in the industry, which, you will agree, is not very fair for the audience [of players].”
However, the authors do not intend to develop the project in the future: “we don’t plan to add more functionality – in general, it does what we need, and for additional functions that we are often asked to add (such as entering queries from the keyboard or inventory windows), it’s better for people to turn to Twine or more complex platforms. Our goal was to make it possible to create interactive works, but if people want to start coding games, inklewriter is not the best tool.”
The full version of the interview can be read here.
You will be able to learn about the latest trends in the gaming industry first-hand, personally meet and discuss working issues with leading companies in the game development and publishing market at White Nights Moscow 2015, which will be held on October 13-14.