Announcing... ink Jam!

Interested in ink? Been meaning to have a go at learning it, but never had the motivation? Or are you a skilled inkist, looking to show off your skills?

Either way, if you want a chance to take ink for a spin, we've got a great opportunity coming up. In collaboration with The Pixel Hunt, the studio behind the multi-award-winning Bury Me, My Love, we're launching ink Jam - a 3 day game jam for games made in ink.

About ink

ink is a scripting language for interactive fiction that's designed to be used by humans. Using a simple but powerful mark-up based approach, it's easy to create a branching flow that responds and shifts based on everything the player chooses. It's quick to test, redraft and restructure. But ink is also powerful, with significant features that allow for complex state-tracking world-modelling. It comes with an IDE, javascript output, and Unity integration.

It's totally free, and being used by studios all over the world to create all kinds of interactive experiences, from a news-game about Uber drivers created by British newspaper the Financial Times, an E3 favourite (https://www.neocabgame.com/) and an IGF finalist (http://wherethewatertasteslikewine.com/), through to a sailing qualitification course, Air New Zealand's chatbot, a game entirely written in emoji, a procedural ASCII dungeon crawler, and a celebrated globe-trotting adventure to name but a few.

How to get involved

The jam is being hosted on itch.io over the weekend of August 31st to September 3rd. Entries can be submitted via the itch jam page, and we'll be judging the results for creativity and technical wizardy.

Once the jam starts we'll be announcing a theme to help get your ideas going. Until then, if you need any inspiration, check out one of the many games written and released using ink, or visit our Patreon tips page for some of the stranger and more powerful things ink can do!