Paradox Interactive and The Chinese Room have shared details in a blog post about developing Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 with Ink and the port they developed for C++ in order to use it in Unreal Engine 5. Ink is an open-source narrative scripting language created by Inkle studios.
The Chinese Room’s Nick Slaven, Studio Technical Director, shared a deeper look at mission scripting and branching narratives to build the game’s narrative. Arone Le Bray, Principal Narrative Designer, added additional color to how the team approaches their storytelling to create spoken word in the same way screenplays are written for film and TV. It’s an interesting look at how storytelling components in-game, such as cutscenes, missions, and more, can all be easily imported into Unreal Engine 5 thanks to this port.
An example was shown of how that looks behind the scenes.
”Example mission in the scripting system.
In a proper game story, there will be hundreds of states, on many story paths, here’s a small snippet of one of the missions in one of our current games.”
In other news, Paradox and Asus united for a sneak peek into the tech powering Bloodlines 2’s next-gen visuals and performance during the ROG Transcendence CES show.
Bloodlines 2 is the long-awaited followup to the cult-classic Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines. The game takes players to the dark underbelly of Seattle, where vampires struggle for survival and supremacy. The Chinese Room took over development from Hardsuit Labs, who had suffered multiple setbacks with the game over the past few years.
