Zarf Updates

Got a bunch of hey-have-you-seen-this about the "Ink Console", a prototype tablet which plays choice-based IF. There's also a crowdfunding preview page.

Yep, I sure have have seen that. On several different forums.

The response from the IF community has been a mix of "That looks like fun!" and "Um, more market research needed? Maybe?"

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I have nothing against homebrew IF systems. They're a mighty and venerable tradition. Creating a new IF tool is fun! And good design practice! And some of them catch on! But most of them don't catch on -- precisely because it's easy and fun and a lot of people do it.

If nobody uses the IF authoring software you wrote, it's no big deal. It was a fun project. Add "unsupported" to the README, push to Github, move on.

If you're building hardware, the stakes are higher. You need people to buy the hardware. Even if you land a crowdfunding campaign for the initial run, you still need people to buy the mass-production release. Gotta convince authors to keep writing games for it! As a commercial platform, that means demonstrating revenue.

(See also v buckenham's post on why game platforms are hard.)

Thus, market research. What is the Ink Console's competition? Choice of Games, most obviously: meaty long-form choice-based games with an established audience and business model. But COG games don't require dedicated hardware. They run on anything -- mobile, desktop, browser. They certainly could run on a dedicated e-ink reader, but nobody's been beating down the door for one.

The Ink Console guy doesn't appear to have considered this. His headline game-design elements are illustrations, inventory, and a health meter -- features which the COG audience demonstratably doesn't care about at all.

(COG games have a numeric stat system, but it's flexible. Each game defines stats and resources which are meaningful for that specific story. "Health" might be one of them, but so could "teacher's pet" or "funky soul".)

This isn't to say that the Ink Console couldn't get a new audience off the ground. There's quite a few commercial text-game markets out there, all of which were started from scratch; the audiences mostly don't overlap. COG is just the one I know best. But again, my sense is that most of these platforms are mobile-centric -- you already have a phone. New hardware needs a hook.

So what does the Ink Console have over more portable formats? The e-ink display. E-ink is light-weight, low-power, way more readable outdoors than your phone. This is not nothing! E-ink is also monochrome and low-res, but it's adequate for text. Not beautiful, but adequate. Kindles have been proving this for years.

I can see a pitch for taking existing text games -- games which people are already playing -- and getting them onto an e-ink reader. Maybe these people should be pitching COG a licensing deal.

Or they could start with online-and-mobile play (same as all the existing markets) and pitch the hardware Ink Console as a luxury add-on. Like selling albums on vinyl -- expensive but the aficionado will love it. Could work! The risk, of course, is that the hardware never sells. Then you're stuck running a mobile game business when you very clearly want to be slinging circuit boards.

What the Ink Console has, really, is potential. And I mean that in the strict sense of "This device mostly doesn't exist yet." The web site is gung-ho about what's going to happen but what's happening now is breadboards and 3d-printed case tests. I don't want to come down on them for not solving all their product problems when there is no product.

Yes, I feel like they should have done another few design iterations before firing up the soldering irons. But eh, I'm a software guy in an old-school IF community; of course I'd say that.

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Other stuff:

The name. It's called "Ink Console", which immediately confusing. My first response, and I'm not the only one, was: "Wow! A hardware reader for Ink games!" (That is, Ink the IF scripting language.) But no: the device's name seems to refer to its e-ink display. Again, audience research.

Speaking of languages. The web site doesn't say anything about the dev system. The FAQ says:

Ink Console runs on its own game engine, which is fully compatible with the SDK. However, we are working to include an option in the SDK that will allow users to import formats from other engines and adjust them to fit the Ink Console SDK format [...]

So maybe Ink-the-language comes later? The hardware spec is low-level (think "microcontroller", not "Raspberry Pi") but IF tools scale down well.

The creator doesn't have to figure this all out right away. Still, we'll want to see details on the roadmap. Especially if they pivot to getting existing games on board!

What are the specs? I'll just copy off the crowdfunding page in case that disappears: ESP32-D0WDQ6, dual-core 32-bit microprocessor; 4 MB of flash memory; 8 MB PSRAM; 520 KB SRAM; wifi; SD card slot; 7.5-inch e-ink screen, 800 x 480 resolution.

The AI concept art. There was a bunch of this on the web site. It was low-effort (the whole point of AI-generated art is that it's low-effort) and the creator seems to have yanked it down. So whatever. Not worth worrying about.

Oh, okay, one detail... There was an image titled "Zork V: The Lost Book". This provoked a certain amount of Internet howling. I regret to inform you that the trademark on "Zork" (as a game title) has been inactive for decades. Anybody could make a game called "Zork V", even a commercial one. (The Zork setting is another matter; please talk to your lawyer about copyrights.)

(Why Zork V? Well, I don't know what the Ink Console guy was thinking, but you can make an argument that Zork IV was Enchanter. Oh, not really, that was a working title, it was dropped long before release; but traces linger. Whereas nobody seriously called Sorcerer anything but Sorcerer... So the position of "Zork V" is open. Sort of. If that was the reasoning, I approve!)

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And now, breaking news...

I was about to fire this post out this morning when I noticed that the Team page had been taken down. (Now says "Under construction".)

Last night, they posted this bsky thread:

(I think "Dana" is "Daniel Puchau", the creator listed on the original crowdfunding page.)

What does this mean? Did they sell the whole thing lock stock and lantern? Hard to say! We will keep an eye out.

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Further update:

Jon Ingold adds:

Quick note from me about this: Dana reached out to me yesterday to discuss the project and its similarity to inkle's branding - one thing he told me is the name will change as part of moving forward in this new direction. So we're happy with that: and we hope it succeeds.

-- post, jon.inkle.co, Feb 20th