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What is Atrament

Atrament is a modular tool to create text games or interactive fiction stories for the web and desktop. It uses Ink as a scripting language and JavaScript+CSS as a runtime and presentation layer.

Most of this documentation describes how to create games with Atrament Web UI.

Example of a game made with Atrament, "The Coiled Crown":

"The Coiled Crown"

Components​

Atrament consists of several JS libraries and applications: Atrament Core, Atrament Web, Atrament Web UI, and Atrament Wizard.

The easiest way to create your own game with Atrament is to use Atrament Web UI - it provides a ready-to-use game engine with various features. However, experienced developers can use the Atrament Web library as a part of their web application, or Atrament Core if they want to create a NodeJS application or use their own set of libraries.

Atrament Core​

Atrament Core is a wrapper around inkjs, which implements basic features and can be used with any libraries. It manages game state, tag parsing, persistent state storage, and sound. Source code, NPM package.

Atrament Web​

Atrament Web is a library for browsers which uses nanostores to manage story state, localforage to manage persistent storage, and howlerjs to manage sound. Can be used in any browser-based projects. Source code, NPM package.

Atrament Web UI​

Atrament Web UI is a web application written in preact (React-like web framework), which can be used to create feature-rich games for both web and desktop:

  • manages game sessions, saves, loads, and checkpoints;
  • custom markup: blocks, tables, info boxes, headers, progress bars, click-to-continue, etc;
  • additional interactive elements: buttons, inputs;
  • extra screens like inventory, character stats, etc. can be created with overlays;
  • multimedia support: images, background, sound, music, and video;
  • story debugger: you can watch and edit variables, run Ink functions, etc;
  • customizable themes, fonts, and CSS styles;
  • export game as a web application (with PWA support), single HTML-file (Twine-like), or as an executable for desktop OS

Source code, feature showcase.

Atrament Wizard​

Atrament Wizard is a command-line utility for Atrament projects, which can be run with npx:

npx atrament-wizard

Source code, NPM package.