Ink Explorer - very handy software

[Steph_McNeal]

I was looking for something like this months ago, but couldn't find it. Was looking for something completely different now and stumbled across it.

Ink Explorer is a piece of software that visualizes the structure of you Ink-story.

Here's how the creator describes it themselves, on Medium:

A tool for stepping through Ink visually and keeping track of variables.

It offers:

• Variable Observation: A persistent view of your story state. If a variable changes, you see it immediately.
• Navigation: You can jump to specific knots or stitches. This is particularly useful when you’re testing late-game content or specific storylet requirements.
• Traceability: It provides a log of the story’s path, which helps when you’re trying to figure out exactly why a specific line of dialogue didn’t trigger.
• Visit Counts: It tells you where you’ve been, and how often.
• State Saving / Loading: It lets you take snapshots of the current state of variables and visits, and restoring it to be able to recreate (for example) a particular moment in the game for testing.

One of the eye-catchers is that it visualizes all your knots an stitches, neatly showing what is connected with what. As you hop through the story, your choices are visually tracked in the graph. You can see the state of your variables at any time and check how many times a knot or stitch has been visited.

These can come in incredibly handy when the narrative grows too complex to oversee in just Inky.

One of the best features for me is that you can click on a knot and start playing from there. Very useful if you need to test a section that occurs late in the story. In Inky, you need to start at the beginning and click all the way through to the part you want to test. In Ink Explorer, you select the knot (maybe even set the variables to what you need) and test it right away.

Ink Explorer is not for writing, you'll still need Inky for that. But it works great alongside it. Downloads are here.