Building newsgames with Inky

This month we'll be learning how to build a newsgame using a tool called Inky.

In the past few years we've seen news organisations experiment with using games to help readers emotionally understand topics. The BBC's Syrian journey (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-32057601), Bloomberg's American mall simulator (https://www.bloomberg.com/features/american-mall-game/), the FT's Uber game (https://ig.ft.com/uber-game/), and the Times' Could you be an assistant referee? (https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/assistant-referee-offside-game-0gjxrnfg6) all show different approaches to building such newsgames. We'll be learning how to write our own narrative using Inky, a tool for producing game scripts. We will then turn that script into a real life playable game.

The tutorial is being written by Ændrew Rininsland (https://twitter.com/aendrew), who worked on the Uber Game at the FT.

Bring a laptop along as this is a practical, hands-on workshop. No programming experience is required. However, if you feel comfortable doing so, please download and install Inky (https://github.com/inkle/inky/releases/tag/0.8.0) and Node (https://nodejs.org/) (the current version). If you have trouble doing that, don't worry, we will help you on the day.

Please make sure you're signed up to Dropbox to view our shared doc (https://bit.ly/journocoders-mar-2018) — and remember to add links to anything data or journalism-related you've seen or worked on to the show and tell section!

Schedule

7:00 🚪 Doors open
7:30 🗣 Show and tell
7:40 💻 Tutorial
9:00 🍺 Drinks at the Ship

What is Journocoders?

Journocoders is a monthly meetup for journalists and others working in the media to learn and share technical skills for use in their reporting. We aim to bring the culture of knowledge sharing from the tech industry to journalism and give people the chance to learn and network in a supportive environment with likeminded individuals.