Ian Thomas

Ian Thomas

@wildwinter.bsky.social

Games, books, larp, films, rats, and shoggoths. Narrative Director @ The Chinese Room. Brit in Stockholm. He/him. Narrative Tools and Articles: https://storytools.se

657 Followers 354 Following 278 Posts Joined Aug 2023
1 day ago
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1 day ago

I've been using Logic Pro and Final Cut and Affinity on an 8GB M3 MacBook Air with no problems.

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1 day ago

Well, Microsoft codesigning sucks for individual hobbyist developers.

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1 week ago
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Game Subtitles — but my text is too long! TL;DR — a solution to take care of subtitle text so you don’t have to.

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/...

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1 week ago

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

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1 week ago
Preview
Game Subtitles — but my text is too long! TL;DR — a solution to take care of subtitle text so you don’t have to.

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/...

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1 week ago

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.

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1 week ago
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@jon.inkle.co It reached Sweden. :-)

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1 week ago

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!)

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1 week ago
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📖 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!

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1 month ago

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.

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3 weeks ago
Story Tools - Narrative Design Tools & Articles Helpful tools, libraries, and articles for games narrative pipelines. Made by Ian Thomas.

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

storytools.se

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3 weeks ago
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Dinky Feature: Scratch Audio TL;DR —in Dinky you can record temp audio for each line of your script.

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/...

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3 weeks ago
Story Tools - Narrative Design Tools & Articles Helpful tools, libraries, and articles for games narrative pipelines. Made by Ian Thomas.

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

storytools.se

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3 weeks ago
Preview
Dinky Feature: Scratch Audio TL;DR —in Dinky you can record temp audio for each line of your script.

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/...

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1 month ago

One think I have learned though (in other projects) is that the compiled Ink is useful, but combining it with the raw source file gives you way more useful data.

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1 month ago

Sure - it's still baby steps and will undoubtedly have missed a bunch of edge cases. I think if you're trying to introspect the Ink structure itself there are maybe better versions out there.

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1 month ago

bsky.app/profile/wild...

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1 month ago

Horses/courses, and I'll continue noodling away at things which make my life slightly easier. :-) Definitely not saying "This is the way!" because for many people or even different projects, it's not. But the more that's in the ecosystem, the better, IMO.

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1 month ago

Ink as a flow tool I really like, though. And the runtime side of it is really good, way better than some solutions that try to fill a similar gap and have different authoring approaches.

I'm not a fan of node-based myself, really. But I have other people who much prefer to consume things that way.

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1 month ago

These definitely use Ink in different ways for different reasons, some of which restrict its inherent power. And there are other solutions and other engines out there.

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1 month ago

And having a bunch of tools in the toolbox are handy. It's why Ink-Tester exists, to do some brute force "did this line ever get hit?" analysis. And why Ink-Localiser exists, which only makes sense if you don't glue together lines. And why Dinky exists, to deal with spoken dialogue lines.

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1 month ago

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.

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1 month ago
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A bit more acceptable I think.

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1 month ago

Updated - tested the new version with 1000 knots and 1500 stitches and it seemed to survive.

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1 month ago

For example, we use Ink for spoken dialogue. Which it *really* wasn't designed for.

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1 month ago

By which I mean - a lot of people are using Ink to solve problems it wasn't written for as we're often short of better solutions. The thing I made is to address some pain points caused by that misuse.

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1 month ago

Ink is made for non-graph, for sure. But we definitely have use cases (and I know others do) where it's not being used like that, as it's a better solution for more basic narrative logic flow than a lot of other things. A misuse of Ink, really, but because it *is* being used, this helps.

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1 month ago

That looks very comprehensive!

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1 month ago

Still work in progress really, figuring out what I need from it. If there's something missing, let me know!

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