inklecast

This week, we weigh in on the VR debate; will it take off, and are there interesting storytelling opportunities?

This week, how games (over)use maps, minimaps and UI to help get players to where they need to go.

The second part in our retrospective on the turn-of-the-century IF scene; focusing on how authors created characters in their stories.

Galatea - http://pr-if.org/play/galatea/

Varicella - http://jayisgames.com/games/varicella/

Make It Good - http://textadventures.co.uk/games/view/5oezm5qia0wu1dkwqrrgbw/make-it-good

We give a round up of some of the latest developments on our narrative scripting language, and talk about some games that are using ink. If you're using ink for your game, we'd love to hear from you!

Links for some of the projects and games discussed in this episode:

Ink developments:

- ink: http://www.inklestudios.com/ink

- Quill: An online ink editor - http://jeejah.xyz/quill/

- jInk - ink implementation in Java - https://github.com/micabytes/jink

- Inky - an ink IDE - https://github.com/inkle/ink/issues/95

Ink games:

- Wayward strand - http://blog.ghostpattern.net/post/144541605956/wayward-strand

- The Last Night - http://oddtales.net/

- Lucerne - http://gamejolt.com/games/lucerne/150140

- The Banner Saga 2 (not actually ink but inklewriter!) http://stoicstudio.com/

- Night School Studio - http://nightschoolstudio.com/

The first in mini-series where Jon reveals some of the best ideas developed in the highly prolific, but often overlooked late-90s/early-00 interactive fiction scene.

This week, IF that leveraged the relationship between the player and protagonist, looking at Spider and Webb, Aisle, and Make it good.

How much does the design of the interface and user experience of interactive fiction matter?

Jon talks parser-based interactive fiction, and Joe discusses his experience designing the Inkle text flow.

Revealing the weirdest way to beat Sorcery 3's toughest boss, an unlikely friendship with a giant insect, and a Molyneux-tastic easter-egg.

Jon emerges from the writers room to drop some hints about the final part of the Sorcery series!

We try to answer a question we've been throwing around a bit recently:

Is it's possible for strong game mechanics to weaken the player's connection with a story?

We're joined by comic book writer Jay Gunn (@GunnComics) to discuss how games can capture the expressiveness of comic books.