About me

My name is Jon Ingold, and I’m a game designer and interactive writer from Cambridge, UK.

inkle

I’m the co-founder of inkle, a company specialising in UI design and interactive stories. inkle has its own blog, which is less tech-focused and more about experiences, stories, and our projects. You can check it out here.

inkle‘s first commercial project is Frankenstein, due in April 2012 for iOS devices. It’s written by Dave Morris (of Fabled Lands) and published by Profile Books.

Game design

I started out writing parser-based interactive fiction (so, games where it’s all text, and the player types commands), and I’ve written over a dozen of these, winning several awards and competitions for my work.

Those games landed me a job as a designer at Sony Playstation’s Cambridge studio, where I was lead designer on a Move-controller party game called TV Superstars. After that project finished, and another was cancelled, I left Sony with a colleague to found inkle.

Software

Writing interactively is half about creating stories, and half about creating the tools to tell those stories. Most of my parser-games were written in Inform, which provides a lot of functionality straight off, but can also be extended, and some of my extensions can be found here.

I’ve also written tools for developing choice-based stories: publicly available is the Kindliser, and I also have a similar tool for writing stories in Undum which I intend to realise… soon.

Finally, inkle is developing a web-editor for writing interactive stories, called the inklewriter. You can find out more on inkle‘s website.

 Writing

I’m also an experienced writer: I’ve written plays for stage and radio, novels, and several short stories. Recently, I’ve had several stories published in Interzone magazine, which has been great.