jon.inkle.co
Narrative @inkle.co he/him
Writer: EXPELLED! / A Highland Song / Heaven's Vault / Overboard! / Over the Alps / Sorcery! / 80 Days. ink co-creator.
“Life doesn't always work out like it's s'posed t' / Like bread doesn't pop when you watch the toaster"
2,451 posts
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667 following
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That’s interesting! I haven’t done many escape rooms but my main takeaway from the ones I have done is that as a player you discard the setting super fast despite it being the main initial hook - and it’s the combination locks that cause that. They encourage / require stripping away colourful fluff
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Roadblocks in stories that only have one way past - that the character then does - are almost hilariously undramatic. There’s that Argonauts movie where they say at the beginning they need the Medusa’s head to kill the kraken, then get it and do that, and it’s a spectacular anticlimax. Oh! Good job!
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(And then there’s one in Outer Wilds. And there’s on in Chants of Senaar. Idk what the moral of that is )
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I remember we had a conversation at inkle about including a keyboard towards the end of HV where you could “talk” to a machine, and decided that anyone who enjoyed doing that would never have got through the rest of the game to get there
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I’d like to say we are deconstructing the combination lock concept from the inside and subverting it. We might be doing that. Or it may be too subtle to call
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YAS!
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i know breaking news
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We just moved over to godot and are still using ink
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We’ve just picked it up and so far it’s pretty great - significantly faster and more lightweight to use
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I don’t have much to say tho except that it’s full of good lines and it’s very pacy. That’s pacy, btw.
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"You gotta be careful when you say bingo round here"
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my favourite-written film of all time is a 90s sex comedy that scores 33% on Rotten Tomatoes. It's definitely trash, and yet the dialogue writing throughout is - just fantastic
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maybe it's just the format of a "talk" is a bad idea in the first place: here perform this 45 minute stand-up routine that by the way has to be accurate and informative as well (* last two parts optional)
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absolutely, because when people really like something it often doesn't matter whether it's any good, we rose-tint away - the really interesting examples (for me anyway) are when moments of strength appear in otherwise terrible pieces, because those moments must REALLY work to show through
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totally, and for different payoffs - the best solution is the one that gives you the opportunity to do something else at the same time, but that thing is specific: a good line, a character bit, a metaphor, whatever. So if the advice is "fix problems in ways that make your story better"... ta bro
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i suppose that does leave scope for talks explaining "how I, in the year X, wrote piece Y, and glean from this what you will". But that takes a certain amount of confidence that anyone will care, compared to "nine tricks to create GREAT characters EVERY TIME"
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maaybe. i do think teaching something is the only way to understand it clearly, and i haven't done much teaching in a long time. but i also feel like every little creative decision is so specific to its context that to generalise anything feels wrong, which I guess speaks to your original post
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Was just thinking this the other day. I’m writing more and better than I ever have, and I feel like I have less and less to say about how it’s done.
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actually, i bet they're not, because no one who finds a book hard wants to read that book
in unrelated news, I'm building an AI that turns exclusionary trash metal into lift-pop
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not too late, and ty
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It’s such a shit the bed take from these supposedly serious people. Imagine writing that crap and expecting people not to laugh at you
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thank you! that is still awesome from where I'm sitting
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it absolutely is going to cause problems
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thanks!
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i might change the 1977 to 1877 and similar if that's okay, just so I can slot it into a Gap
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When you say "by E.Mader" - does that mean the credit you want, or that it's not written by you?
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Interestingly if you wave your signature under a Sainsbury’s barcode scanner it rings it up as a packet of Mentos
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bad ideas done badly *ding!*
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thank you for sending me this over the world wide WEB
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Yes and a thousand times yes
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wilco!
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good grief
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something new + unannounced
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My idea was to have people put text in the alt text of the screenshot - I can copy/paste from there and it has a much bigger character limit