Ink course: interactive city

Konstantinos Dimopoulos said he will run a hands-on session this Thursday on building an interactive city in text with ink, a scripting language used for branching stories in games. (x.com) The announcement came from Dimopoulos’ @gnomeslair account on X and named the session “Create An Interactive City In Text using ink.” Dimopoulos describes himself elsewhere as a game urbanist, game designer, researcher and educator, and SAE Athens lists him as Head of Games. (x.com) (bsky.app) (sae.edu) Ink is Inkle’s open-source writing system for interactive narrative: authors write plain text, add choices and variables, and the script can drive anything from a text scene to a larger game. Inkle says ink, its Inky editor and its Unity integration are all freely available under the Massachusetts Institute of Technology license. (inklestudios.com) (github.com) Inkle’s documentation says ink is built for “text-centric games” and for more graphical games with heavily branching stories. Its beginner guide frames it as a way to write web-based interactive fiction, while the main manual says it can handle everything from simple choose-your-own-path stories to dialogue that splits and reconnects. (github.com) (inklestudios.com) (github.com) That makes a city-building workshop in ink less about maps and 3D assets than about systems of place: streets, districts, landmarks, routines and the choices that move a reader through them. Dimopoulos has spent years working at that overlap of games and urban space, including publishing on game cities and running game events through SAE Athens. (x.com) (bsky.app) (sae.edu) Ink has been public for years, but Inkle says the project’s open beta began in 2016 and later picked up the Inky editor and a Unity plug-in. The studio’s site still presents it as a current tool for professional game development as well as choice-based interactive fiction. (inklestudios.com 1) (inklestudios.com 2) For people joining Thursday’s session, the pitch is straightforward: start with plain text, learn ink’s basic syntax, and use choices to turn a city into something a reader can explore. The tool was built for branching narrative, and Dimopoulos is applying it to urban storytelling. (x.com) (inklestudios.com)