Another fun session teaching Ink yesterday, having a look at the two mirrored twins of short cut syntax: threads (for reusing the same choices in lots of places) and gathers (for quickly adding choices that will only ever be used in one place). One of the students is looking to build a basketball based visual novel and found it really helpful to have the two ways of thinking about the parts of his game; the mechanics of playing basketball will be built of lots of threads, with options coming and going depending on the state of the game, while conversations and dialogue will be built with gathers allowing for lots of specific context and helping the dialogue not sound repetitive. And we expanded out the LIST driven example from last week to start using some of the things we'd learned. #VisualNovel #GameDev #InteractiveFiction