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Ink Key Details
Team
Samples & Documentation
Project Overview Ink is a Japanese style RPG designed with several unique gameplay elements in mind. It follows the story of a young author, currently in a slump, who finds himself in the world of his unfinished novel. He soon discovers that something is rewriting the story and joins with his own main characters to discover what's going on. The game itself is not currently in production. A large portion of the documentation was written for fun and as a project intended to teach people a bit about what goes into the game design process. Project History The massive travelogue I wrote about my time in Japan during 2007 and 2008 turned out to be an extremely popular feature on my personal web site. After its completion, I returned to writing more ordinary posts on a variety of subjects but, by early 2009, I was getting tired of that and wanted to start on another big project. I had several potential ideas, one of which involved creating a sample design document for a game, while providing information on what each section was for and why I made different decisions, in order to give my readers a better idea of the game design process. Around that time, I came up with the idea for Ink, a RPG about an author pulled into the world of his own novel, who has the power to manipulate and change the world and characters with his writing. A short time later, I put a poll on my site asking readers what they'd like me to focus on in my future posts, with Ink being one of the options. It won, so I began work on the documentation. For the duration of the project, I dedicated a large number of the posts on my site to Ink. The general format is that of a design document, though one written in a somewhat unordered fashion. Each Ink update contained a new portion of the design document, be it a character profile, details on a certain element of the gameplay or battle system, part of the story, or the like, along with my comments on how the piece fits into the whole and what led me to make certain decisions regarding the design. While I'd love to take the Ink documentation and turn it into a full game someday, and have gotten a lot of interest from my readers in that regard, I don't currently have the funds or the team to do so. Because of that, in early 2012, I placed Ink on indefinite hiatus in order to spend more time working on smaller indie games, though I hope to return to it someday. |
