Yeah, I remember playing with Inklewriter a bit. I'm a systems / networking programmer, so I don't touch many shaders myself, but I know the fundamentals: the system calculates the different permutations of the shader settings, and builds them separately.
I imagine you could do (or are doing) the same thing with a tree structure and an ink script: each possible text choice is a separate limb or twig, and the "address" of the node is just the full list of choices it took you to get there.
Great, now I'll be thinking about this the rest of the afternoon. Lol