I've made a new dialogue system. It's open source, has a friendly editor, and runs on Unreal, Unity, Javascript, and Godot. You can find it at patterkit.dev And I've written too much text about it over here: medium.com/@wildwinter/...

PatterKit - Write it, play it, test it, ship it.

An open toolkit for dialogue and branching narrative in games. Your writers author in a calm, code-free editor; you drop one small file into Unity, Unreal, Godot, or the web and play it.

patterkit.dev

I wanted to collect some stuff into index cards so I could get back to them. And share that with Rachel. Digitally. Partly because I have a poor memory. A simple card database. God help me, I even missed MS Access. So I built one. You can use it, if you like. wildwinter.medium.com/wildcards-wh...

Wildcards: Where’s my simple card database?

TL;DR: God help me, I actually miss Microsoft Access and FileMaker. I built Wildcards: a fast, local-first way to keep information on…

wildwinter.medium.com

I appear to be in Birmingham. Is this a good or a bad thing?

Happy Saturday - potential opportunities. I'm putting together a database of writers for potential upcoming roles. IF these opportunities go forward, they would be freelance contract roles. The work would take place on GMT/GMT+1 time. If interested please read the whole thread before responding.

A tiny thing - but the game-subtitles tool I created can now drop in word-wrapping breaks for compiled Ink JSON content (in the preprocessor). Probably only of interest to a very few! github.com/wildwinter/g...

GitHub - wildwinter/game-subtitles: Subtitling tool for games which preps lines for subtitles and then helps dynamically display at runtime.

Subtitling tool for games which preps lines for subtitles and then helps dynamically display at runtime. - wildwinter/game-subtitles

github.com

"Mar-vel at the tess-se-la-tion of my fi-nest che-dar cheese..." (What, no one else thinks of Gilbert and Sullivan while trying to put away food in the fridge?)

Things I have been enjoying this weekend after forgetting how good they are: * Who Framed Roger Rabbit? * All tracks by System of a Down

This week on the Game Narrative Kaleidoscope Podcast: Veteran narrative designer @wildwinter.bsky.social takes us on a wild tour of the boundaries of story design and LARPs. One for all, and all for one! Check it out here: www.inklestudios.com/kaleidoscope... ... or any-podcast-place!

I got annoyed that my pipeline tools might fail when writing files into Perforce, Github or any other repo. So here is a tiny open-source library that handles checking out, adding, and deleting files for whichever version control system happens to be in place. wildwinter.medium.com/simple-versi...

Simple Version Control Lib

TL;DR — a tiny agnostic wrapper around version control systems, so your game tools don’t have to care which one the user has. Find the code…

wildwinter.medium.com

I got annoyed that my pipeline tools might fail when writing files into Perforce, Github or any other repo. So here is a tiny open-source library that handles checking out, adding, and deleting files for whichever version control system happens to be in place. wildwinter.medium.com/simple-versi...

Simple Version Control Lib

TL;DR — a tiny agnostic wrapper around version control systems, so your game tools don’t have to care which one the user has. Find the code…

wildwinter.medium.com

important

Well, Microsoft codesigning sucks for individual hobbyist developers.

Game Subtitles - what to do if your text is just too long? I've created a tool to make this easier - paginating and hyphenating where it needs to, in a variety of languages. In the vain hope that maybe I won't have to worry about it ever again! You can find it here: medium.com/@wildwinter/...

Game Subtitles — but my text is too long!

TL;DR — a solution to take care of subtitle text so you don’t have to.

medium.com

PSA: a lot of people asked for an ebook edition — and we’ve been able to put one together! And with hyperlinks, of course.

inkle@inkle.co · 5mo ago

📖 THE GAME NARRATIVE KALEIDOSCOPE ❄️ is out NOW! www.inklestudios.com/kaleidoscope 100+ essays on writing & narrative design, with articles from the writers of Baldur's Gate 3, Control, Call of Duty, Prince of Persia, Tomb Raider, Sam and Max... ALSO the Kaleidoscope Podcast with 2 full eps!

Game Subtitles - what to do if your text is just too long? I've created a tool to make this easier - paginating and hyphenating where it needs to, in a variety of languages. In the vain hope that maybe I won't have to worry about it ever again! You can find it here: medium.com/@wildwinter/...

Game Subtitles — but my text is too long!

TL;DR — a solution to take care of subtitle text so you don’t have to.

medium.com

Greg Davies: Great task, well done. Didn‘t eat a thing. Persephone: Thank you. Alex Horne: Ah. Well. Let’s take another look at that pomegranate.

@jon.inkle.co It reached Sweden. :-)

Note that I totally failed to hit the brief here and so said more than one thing. Ah well! (Good stuff in this book. Lots of good juicy crunchiness, in fact. From a lot of familiar names!)

Game Developer@gamedeveloper.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Book excerpt: The Game Narrative Kaleidoscope

📖 THE GAME NARRATIVE KALEIDOSCOPE ❄️ is out NOW! www.inklestudios.com/kaleidoscope 100+ essays on writing & narrative design, with articles from the writers of Baldur's Gate 3, Control, Call of Duty, Prince of Persia, Tomb Raider, Sam and Max... ALSO the Kaleidoscope Podcast with 2 full eps!

Ah, shit... woke up in a mysterious and abandoned location, and I've lost my memory. I hope a series of gradually escalating challenges positioned between me and escape can instruct me how to open doors, use my powers, and double jump.

I've collected some tools and articles here, as it's all getting a bit messy. storytools.se

New feature for Dinky (the dialogue Ink editor) - record scratch audio for each line while in the editor, and be notified when it goes out of date. medium.com/@wildwinter/...

Dinky Feature: Scratch Audio

TL;DR —in Dinky you can record temp audio for each line of your script.

medium.com

I've collected some tools and articles here, as it's all getting a bit messy. storytools.se

New feature for Dinky (the dialogue Ink editor) - record scratch audio for each line while in the editor, and be notified when it goes out of date. medium.com/@wildwinter/...

Dinky Feature: Scratch Audio

TL;DR —in Dinky you can record temp audio for each line of your script.

medium.com

Interesting feedback on "but this doesn't make sense for use with Ink" and that's true, for a bunch of 'proper' uses of Ink it's not necessarily useful. Mostly this is me noodling to see what tools I can build, but a lot of ways Ink is being used now is not necessarily what Ink was designed for.

Working on some optimisations for what I call "The @richardcobbett.bsky.social Effect"

Another tool! Ink Explorer. Visualises the shape of an Ink story and lets you play through from any point, watching variables (and tweaking them), keeping track of visit counts, and letting you snapshot and restore the state. Early days - hope it's useful to someone! medium.com/@wildwinter/...

Visualising the Flow: Ink Explorer

TL;DR — A tool for stepping through Ink visually and keeping track of variables.

medium.com

In modern problems, that's the second time our robot has made horrific noises while choking on a d20. The same d20. (Why is it on the floor? Because it's the cat's d20.)

It's strange how 1994's 'The Paper' (Michael Keaton, Glenn Close) won so many more awards than 1996's 'The Rock' (Sean Connery, Nicholas Cage) and yet was beaten by *checks notes* Edward Scissorhands- No, never mind.