Pros & Cons
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- Makes it simple to write and organize text adventure content and logic
- Free and open source
- Easily converts projects to more powerful professional engines
- Interactive tutorials
- Impressive real-world examples
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- Only for text adventures
- Higher production value requires learning more complex tools
- Somewhat dated appearance
Inklewriter Specs
| Platform | Web |
| Starting Price | Free |
Making video games is hard work, but game development software can teach anyone how to do it. And if you’re a novice, or simply someone who prefers stories over action, making a text adventure is an excellent place to start. Inklewriter is an intuitive, free text adventure editor from the acclaimed Inkle Studios. It’s easy enough for beginners while giving you terrific tools to transition to something more professional. Our Editors’ Choice winner, GameMaker Studio 2, covers a wider variety of genres, but Inklewriter is an excellent tool for creating text-based titles.
What Kinds of Games Can You Make With Inklewriter?
Inklewriters lets you make text adventures, interactive fiction, visual novels, or whatever else you might call video games where the primary action is reading words and picking responses. It’s a classic, important genre going all the way back to the beginning of the medium. Today, the best text adventure releases serve as smarter literary counterparts to explosive AAA games, often created by more diverse voices thanks to the lower barrier to entry.
However, text adventures are a somewhat niche genre—reading words isn’t the same as firing a gun, after all. Modern examples spruce things up with audiovisual elements, which Inklewriter supports. Twine is another game dev tool only meant for text adventures. Meanwhile, GameMaker Studio 2 lets you create platformers, puzzle games, and 3D experiences.
If you do like text adventures, though, Inklewriter has an impressive pedigree. Its parent company, Inkle, used portions of the tool in its acclaimed games, such as 80 Days, Heaven’s Vault, and the Sorcery remake. The team’s brief sample game, The Intercept, is a moody spy thriller. As for third parties, the tech powers the dialogue options in The Banner Saga. Most recently, Inklewriter let Sega put out a delightful April Fool’s Day joke: The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog.
Developing Games With Inklewriter
Starting Inklewriter is as simple as visiting the website in your web browser. Note that you must create an account to save your work. I found the site’s appearance somewhat dated, like the old-fashioned pre-iOS 7 iPhone interface. Inklewriter hasn’t received significant updates in some time. Still, what’s here works well. The tutorial is a text adventure itself that walks you through the app’s functionality, using interactivity to make sure you understand each lesson.
Text adventures consist of words and underlying logic dictating how and when players encounter those words. You start with a section and then write branching options. In my sample game, the player must correctly identify the lyrics to the Mac Tonight theme song. Inklewriter identifies loose ends so that players don’t get accidentally stuck, and it mentions if you’ve created a loop (useful for players to quickly restart). As with any game development endeavor, you should always test and tweak as you go.
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You can make a fully functional text adventure game in just a few minutes, something not even Nintendo can boast with Game Builder Garage. However, Inklewriter also has options for increasing your game’s complexity. As you create multiple sections and link them together, the map gives you a visual overview of how everything connects. There's an ongoing list of every piece of in-game content, so you can quickly jump to a particular section. Widgets let you stylize the text, add images, and merge paragraphs to hide seams between separate content blocks. You can even perform light programming to trigger events when players meet certain conditions, such as returning to the same section a particular number of times.
When you’re finished and ready to publish your game, just click the share button. Inklewriter generates a playable link anyone can access in their browser, as well as a version in the JSON format.
Taking Your Inkle Games to the Next Level
If all you want to do is casually make browser-based text adventures, then Inklewriter has you covered. But if you want to graduate to something more substantial, Inklewriter is only the beginning. Inklewriter lets you export your story in the custom Ink format. This is an open-source programming language Inkle created specifically for high-quality text adventures. It shares many qualities with Inklewriter, such as an intuitive editor and browser exports, but it’s much more advanced.
Although its syntax is not as arduous as other programming tools, Ink still requires some coding knowledge. You must know your way around GitHub to even access it. To get the most from Ink, you must use it to supplement a more robust engine. Inkle provides a Unity plugin, but you could theoretically take it wherever you want since Ink is open source. That’s how you up the production value with fancy animations and atmospheric sound. But to do that you need to understand Unity, a more challenging proposition for newcomers.
If you’re serious about game development and want to make this next step, Ink is awesome middleware for incorporating narrative scripting into your project. Integrating into Unity is also your best shot for making a game you can eventually port to consoles and PC. Besides the tutorials, check out the Inkle community Discord to find help, learn tips, and bounce around cool ideas.
Spilling Ink
Inklewriter further democratizes game development with effective tools that let anyone write, organize, and share their own text adventures. The app's optional advanced integration with Inkle’s other programming languages and engines makes it useful as your game development ambitions grow. It doesn't let you create every kind of game, but Inklewriter makes specific ones extremely well.
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Final Thoughts
Inklewriter
Inklewriter is an easy-to-use text adventure creator that lets anyone create word-based games, with many options for adding professional-grade elements.