If you write anything for video games, whether it be the story, the dialogue, or even just simple character barks, you know that you have to use some kind of program to help you with it. In the past, I’ve used script writing programs for my needs, such as Scrivener or Fade-In. But as time went on, and I joined a team that’s making a narrative game in Unity called “Rockin’ Racket,” those script writing programs lost their use for me as my needs changed. So, I turned to other options: Yarn, Twine, and Ink.

Yarn: The one that I have basically no experience with. I’ve looked at the editor for it and read up on how it works a bit, but nothing really past that.

Since we’re making a game in Unity, my biggest worry early on was implementing what I wrote in a program into Unity itself. So, I talked to others about it and learned that Yarn basically would be a huge pain to write in as it doesn’t really work with Unity at all, or would at least take too much time and effort in order to get it to work. After looking into it a bit further, I learned that they were right. One nice thing I learned though was that it has in-editor testing, so that’s neat. In summary: too much of a hassle to even try to work in. No hate to anybody who uses it and/or enjoys it, it just wasn’t something that could help me.

Twine: This is the second program I looked into using for our game “Rockin’ Racket.” I’ve used it in the past as well but nothing really stuck out to me about it at the time. But after working on our game’s story a bit, I decided to hop back into the good ‘ole spiderwebs of Twine to see if it could help me. My biggest impression and takeaway from using it is that it is phenomenal if you are a person who better processes information visually.

The modules connect together nicely, or at least until you get too many and don’t organize them in some way. But still, you can easily see the pathing and branches to the story. It certainly helped me visualize the route I wanted to take the story beats and little cinematic moments for my teams’ game. But, It still wasn’t for me. I loved the visual aspect of it, but it still felt too “code-y” for me to work in. Connecting the modules was easy enough, and I liked the simplicity of what you can do in terms of choices, but everything else just felt too confusing to me.

The other big issue that I had with it was that it was also going to be a hassle for me to get into Unity since it exports as a .twee file. What the hell am I supposed to do with that? I’m sure I could have kept trying to figure something out, but at that point I had already heard of a much better writing program that already had the ability to easily implement into Unity: Ink.

Ink: The program that I’ve done all my work in for “Rockin’ Racket,” spanning over about a year now (and counting). At first I was intimidated by it, thinking that it was going to be hard to figure out how to use. But then I kept looking into it, and realized that my initial thoughts were a bit off.

It has a bit of a learning curve to it, I’ll admit. Especially if you want to use all the features it has to offer, such as if-else statements, variables, and other forms of logic. For my purposes, I didn’t need all that, so that helped make it feel less intimidating. Once you get past that learning phase, you realize that it truly is meant for writers rather than programmers, and that’s what I love the most about it. It’s simple, and fun, once you get the hang of it. If you really wanted to, you could easily make a visual novel-style game just with Ink. Once you understand how knots (main sections), stitches (sub-sections), diverts (connections between knots/stitches/choices), and choices work, you’re all set to make something interesting with it.

One of my downsides with it though is that it is pretty easy to get overwhelmed with text or get lost in the grand scheme of things in your Ink file. You could always use control+find to look for specific parts of your file, as long as you know the naming convention you used, but that’s not typically something you would think of right off the bat. The best thing that I’ve found to combat that issue is to either use a bunch of spacings between your knots so they are easier to see. Either that or make a brand new file for every single section and just try to connect them all later somehow. Another downside that I’ve run into several times with the Ink files is that sometimes the content of the file just gets randomly deleted. I suspect it’s an issue of having too many different Ink files open at a time and copy & pasting between them, but who knows. Eventually you can get the content to stay in the file, but you may need to save frequently and save back-ups somewhere.

On the bright side though, Ink does include its own in-editor testing like Yarn does, meaning that you can see and test your work in real time as you write it.

That comes in super handy if you want to make sure everything is connected properly and don’t want to have to export it first to test it (like Twine). The other good thing about Ink, and that I mentioned earlier, is that there is already a plugin for Unity that allows you to use Ink in it. There’s a bit of programming involved so you’d either need to learn it yourself if you are the writer or just hope you have a programmer that can do it for you. Funny enough, that’s what it’s like for my team. I write in Ink, export it and give it to a programmer, and he plugs it into the game and makes sure it works.

Ultimately, it’s up to the writer/narrative designer to decide what writing program they want to use. All of the programs have some ups and downs to them, that’s just how it is. You just need to find the program that suits your needs and that you are happy with. And hopefully, my experiences with just a couple of them can help you make your own decision.

Lastly, if you wish to follow the progress, and eventual release, of our game “Rockin’ Racket,” feel free to check out the game’s social media: Instagram, Twitter (X), Youtube