I spent the summer of 2016 desperately trying to write a novel. Most days I didn't manage more than a paragraph. I' spend most of my laptop time distracted on either reading about successful tech people or watching random things on

Youtube

. One day I came across a

choose your own adventure

game where you were accused of being a double agent. I must've played that game at least three dozen times trying to get the best outcome.

The game wasn't an ambitious game. In fact it wasn't even a commercial release. It was released by

Inkle

as an example of what you could create using their

open source

scripting language Ink. I was blown away. Not as a consumer, but as a fellow creator. I looked at this and thought I need to make something like this! I could make something like this. Suddenly writing a novel didn't seem good enough. Now I wanted to write an interactive fiction game.

I spent a few days reading about Ink, trying to pump myself up to actually write my game. But I never even downloaded the scripting language. Truth be told, I was just getting into

programming

at the time so I didn't have any confidence in being able to undertake open source tools and just use them at my whims.

Yesterday though, when I saw Ink pop back up in my life through

Hacker News

, I glanced at Inkle's website -- they've created some badass looking games! -- and read through Ink's documentation page on

Github

. I might not have a job like I thought I would have by this time, but I did have extreme confidence in being able to use Ink. While reading the docs, its conventions just made sense to me.

Oh and I also have a good use case for it. A project with 

no-algorithm

. I've already begun the 

freewriting

process.