The Ink Console
Thursday, February 20, 2025 (updated 2 hours later)
Comments: 16 (latest 6 days later)
Tagged: if, interactive fiction, crowdfunding, ink console
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.
Ink Console photograph from the web site.
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?"
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.
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!)
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:
Dear community, 🙏 Thanks to the incredible reception we've received on social media and in the press, Ink Console has gained overwhelming visibility in record time. This exposure has led to an unexpected proposal, which has prompted me to make an important decision:
I inform you that we will no longer proceed with the CrowdSupply campaign we had planned. We've received an offer that will guide the project forward without anyone needing to risk their money.
With this new direction, I have decided to step aside so the project can continue progressing under a new launch strategy. This marks a transition in the project's direction, but the commitment to the original goal of building a creator community remains the same.
I deeply appreciate the support you've given so far, and I will continue to follow the project's development, albeit now from a different role. This will be my last post as Dana on this Ink Console account.
(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.
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.
Comments from Mastodon
@zarfeblong correct me if I'm wrong but Playdate already has 16Mb RAM and Ink interpreter library and it's still not a green land of IFs and VNs
https://help.play.date/hardware/the-specs/
https://devforum.play.date/t/tinta-another-ink-language-runtime-for-the-playdate/16848
@oreolek It would take market-building work, to be sure.
@oreolek @zarfeblong I love the idea of text adventures on the Playdate. I have one and love it. I have a can't-fail idea on how to use the crank to enter letters at the > prompt, too (attached)
@icecreamjonsey @zarfeblong I hope it'll understand abbreviations.
@zarfeblong it feels to me like that type of device might be a good fit for VN-style games, which is a somewhat different market than COG games
@zarfeblong "Whereas nobody seriously called Sorcerer anything but Sorcerer..."
Unseriously, you can find references to ZORK-NUMBER 5 in https://github.com/historicalsource/sorcerer/blob/master/gparser.zil so in that one particular sense I guess Sorcerer *is* Zork V.
Seems to have been an attempt at creating a common framework for the Zork and Zork-adjacent games, but that Sorcerer is as far as it got. (Perhaps it added too much overhead to fit into Spellbreaker?)
@et_andersson Oh! Nice. I didn't think to look for ZORK-NUMBER after the original trilogy.
Enchanter has a file called "z4.zil", although it looks like they later changed it to "enchanter.zil". Sorcerer never had a "z5.zil" (that we can see) so I assumed they'd dropped the convention. But I see ZORK-NUMBER persisted.
@zarfeblong Yeah, I noticed there was no z5.zil in the archived source code. Also, ZORK-NUMBER doesn't seem to be part of the older versions so it's probably just a technical detail. I don't even know for sure if that version of Sorcerer was ever released?
The danger of re-releasing is, of course, that bugs may be introduced. Like how the FANTASIES table isn't used in some versions of Zork II, or how the initial spells in your spellbook changed order in at least one version of Enchanter.
@et_andersson Yes, well, this is why I write voluminous regression tests. I don't think Infocom had that capability. :)
@et_andersson "the FANTASIES table isn't used in some versions" -- Is this maybe what's going on with me having a memory of there being some unique text for if you're fantasizing while inside the Oddly-Angled Rooms (hallucinate a crowd in the stands or something like that), but for the life of me I haven't been able to trigger it in the version of Z2 that's on the Masterpieces CD? Or is this Mandela effect at work and there never was any such thing?
@arcanetrivia I believe so, yes. The last archived version of the source code did try to restore the functionality, but still managed to get it wrong:
https://github.com/the-infocom-files/zork2/issues/8
Very annoying to test since it happens so rarely to begin with!
@arcanetrivia Dave Lebling mentioned i an interview for Your Computer magazine (May 1987) that he had upgraded the Zork parser for the Zork Trilogy package. Maybe that's where the Fantasize effect was accidentally dropped?
Or maybe it was even earlier? It was implemented as a special case in the code that lists objects, and there are several iterations of that.
@arcanetrivia Though the only bit I remember where the Wizard has a special case for the oddly angled room wasn't tied to the Fantasize spell:
Probably meant as a hint, but all I know of baseball I learned from the Peanuts comic strip, so if I ever saw it it did not help.
@zarfeblong little disappointed it's not touchscreen or color e-ink (the 7 color screens look quite nice, even the 3 color is pretty good), i guess that's to keep the cost down, though they really only cost a few dollars more than the monochrome ones.
generally not a fan of touchscreen but i think it's a mistake for them to not use it, it's a good input mechanism for onscreen controls and moving a cursor SUCKS on e-ink, they update very slowly.