InkleWriter is a tool that is similar to Twine for creating interactive fiction. It is web-based and has many similar features, including the ability to save working progress in the Cloud, to create branching story structures with critical story paths, and the ability to add interactivity. The interface is skeuomorphic, reminiscent of a wooden desk, and the available tools are simple and easy to follow. Developers create sections of text or passages in the same way as Twine, and users will then have the option to choose which Passage to visit next, built in by the author. This enables the production of “choose your own path stories”.
Feelings
Popular with the interactive fiction community, InkleWriter’s interface is cumbersome, ugly, and at least 15 years out of date. The program has some powerful features; these are transparent and easy to use, but the experience of creating material in InkleWriter is not pleasant. Furthermore, though it supports logic, it is difficult to get beneath its hood and to do anything more complex than variable if-then testing. Because the code is not immediately transparent, more complex logic is unavailable to developers. It is also more focused on textual outputs than media outputs. While Twine was developed in a similar way, it has evolved as the web has become a multimedia platform, but InkleWriter focuses on the written word.
Evaluation
Ultimately, from a surface perspective, InkleWriter is less powerful than Twine, and that is the critical challenge we encountered in developing content with it. There is something to be said for an approach that obscures some of the development process from a beginner’s perspective. In the case of InkleWriter, the coding beneath the outputs is obscured. Considering this is one of Twine’s strengths – its ability to use CSS, JavaScript, and HTML and all the available features of those languages in producing interactive fiction – then InkleWriter has clear limitations.
Application
In a comparison between the two platforms, Twine is the more robust, but InkleWriter enables more rapid development of text and image-based choose your own path stories with logic built-in. This is merely because the smaller feature set is entirely push-button and menu-driven, not requiring any programming knowledge, although it does require some appreciation of logic systems. I cannot imagine using it for the development of immersive journalism in the future, merely because there is no advantage in prototyping in this system and then transferring that to Twine when the differences in complexity are both so marked and Twine is still a user-friendly platform.
Conclusions
I evaluated InkleWriter for the sake of completion. Researching the interactive fiction community reveals that the platform has many users, and this is likely due to its simplicity and ease of use. However, it is not the strongest of the two free platforms available.