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Inky

Inky is an editor for ink, inkle's markup language for writing interactive narrative in games, as used in 80 Days. It's an IDE (integrated development environment), because it gives you a single app that lets you play in the editor as you write, and fix any bugs in your code.

Features

  • Play as you write: The play pane remembers the choices that you made, so when Inky recompiles, it fast-forwards to the last point you were at in the flow.
  • Syntax highlighting
  • As-you-type error highlighting. Inky is constantly compiling, allowing you to fix errors early.
  • Issue browser: Lists errors, warnings and TODOs in your ink, and allows you to jump to the exact line number and file in the source.
  • Jump to definition: Divert targets (like -> theStreet) are hyperlinked can be followed by alt-clicking.
  • Support multi-file projects: - Inky automatically infers your story's structure from the INCLUDE lines, meaning that there's no need for an additional project file. To create a new include file, simply type INCLUDE yourfile.ink where you want to include it.
  • Export to JSON: Although this isn't necessary if you're using the ink-Unity-integration plugin, Inky allows you to export to ink's compiled JSON format, which is especially useful in other ink runtime implementations, such as inkjs, for running ink on the web.
  • File watching: Modern text editors, including Inky, watch for changes to files on disk, so that if you change them it reflects those changes. This is especially helpful if you keep your ink in source control.

Project status

Inky has been used extensively on multiple projects by different developers. Nevertheless, it isn't as robust or feature complete as many other text editors you may have used, since it's specialist software made by game developers in their spare time.

The informal TODO.md lists some missing features and known issues. If you want to discuss one, or request a new fix or feature, please create a github issue.

To keep up to date with the latest news about ink sign up for the mailing list.

Download

Mac, Windows and Linux

Download the latest release

Project settings file

Warning: For the technically inclined - you need to understand what a JSON file is to do the following!

To customise Inky settings for your specific ink project, create a JSON file with the same name as your main ink file, except with a .settings.json extension. For example, if your main ink file is called my_great_story.ink, then name your JSON file my_great_story.settings.json.

Here is an example settings file:

{
    "customInkSnippets": [
        {
            "name": "Heaven's Vault",
            "submenu": [
                {
                    "name": "Camera",
                    "ink": ">>> CAMERA: Wide shot"
                },
                {
                    "separator": true
                },
                {
                    "name": "Walk",
                    "ink": ">>> WALK: TheInscription"
                },
                {
                    "name": "More snippets",
                    "submenu": [
                        {
                            "name": "A snippet in a submenu",
                            "ink": "This snippet of ink came from a submenu."
                        },
                    ]
                }
            ]
        }
    ],

    "instructionPrefix": ">>>"
}

  • customInkSnippets - this array allows your to add your own project-specific ink snippets to the Ink menu. There are three types of item you can add to the array:

    • An ink snippet: Requires name for the name of the menu item and ink for the snippet of ink it will insert into the editor.
    • A separator: Use {"separator": true} to add a horizonal line separator into the menu at this point.
    • A sub-menu: To nest more snippets into a sub-menu, use name for the sub-menu name, and then submenu with another array in the same format.

  • instructionPrefix - A common convention is to use a particular text format in ink to instruct the game to perform certain actions rather than presenting the text verbatim to players.

    For example, at inkle we would write something like >>> CAMERA: BigSwoop in ink. The >>> isn't directly built into ink, and this entire text is simply passed through as plain text. But we have custom game code to interpret it and turn it into an action that takes place in-game. To help support this within Inky, you can define an instructionPrefix, if you have a particular consistent way of writing these actions.

    When Inky sees this, it will highlight the line of text both in the editor and player views, so that you can clearly see that it's not part of the game text itself.

Implementation details

Inky is built using:

  • Electron, a framework by GitHub to build cross-platform Desktop app using HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
  • Ace, a full-featured code editor built for the web.
  • Photon, for some of the components. However, the dependency could probably be removed, since its only used for small portions of the CSS.

Inky includes a copy of inklecate, the command line ink compiler.

Help develop Inky!

Take a look at the issues page for an issue with a "help wanted" label. We try to provide some basic instructions on how to get started with the development of the feature whenever we add the label.

To build the project:

  • Install node.js if you don't already have it
  • Clone the repo
  • On Mac, double-click the INSTALL_AND_RUN.command script. On Windows, open Powershell, cd into the app directory, and type npm install, then npm start.
  • For subsequent runs, if no npm packages have changed, you can run the RUN.command script on Mac, or type npm start in the shell (on Windows).

Linux

Tested on a fresh Ubuntu 16.04 LTS VM installation (equivalent processes should work for other distributions)

  • Install build tools

sudo apt-get install -y dkms build-essential linux-headers-generic linux-headers-$(uname -r)

  • Pre-requisites

sudo apt install git

sudo apt install curl

  • Install node and npm

curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_8.x | sudo -E bash -

sudo apt-get install -y nodejs

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80 --recv-keys 3FA7E0328081BFF6A14DA29AA6A19B38D3D831EF

echo "deb http://download.mono-project.com/repo/ubuntu stable-xenial main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mono-official-stable.list

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install mono-complete

  • Clone the inky repo

git clone https://github.com/inkle/inky.git

  • Test inklecate_win with mono (should output usage info)

mono app/main-process/ink/inklecate_win.exe

  • Install and run inky

./INSTALL_AND_RUN.command

  • For subsequent runs, if no npm packages have changed, launch inky as below (otherwise re-run previous step):

./RUN.command

Translation

Translation files are located under app/main-process/i18n/.
If a particular locale file is missing (or if it's missing some keys), you can generate it with the following command: cd app && npm run generate-locale -- <locale> ./main-process/i18n/.

License

Inky and ink are released under the MIT license. Although we don't require attribution, we'd love to know if you decide to use ink a project! Let us know on Twitter or by email.

The MIT License (MIT)

Copyright (c) 2016 inkle Ltd.

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

Inky is named after a black cat based in Cambridge, UK.