Book Image

Dynamic Story Scripting with the ink Scripting Language

By : Daniel Cox
Book Image

Dynamic Story Scripting with the ink Scripting Language

By: Daniel Cox

Overview of this book

ink is a narrative scripting language designed for use with game engines such as Unity through a plugin that provides an application programming interface (API) to help you to move between the branches of a story and access the values within it. Hands-On Dynamic Story Scripting with the ink Scripting Language begins by showing you how ink understands stories and how to write some simple branching projects. You'll then move on to advanced usage with looping structures, discovering how to use variables to set up dynamic events in a story and defining simple rules to create complex narratives for use with larger Unity projects. As you advance, you'll learn how the Unity plugin allows access to a running story through its API and explore the ways in which this can be used to move data in and out of an ink story to adapt to different interactions and forms of user input. You'll also work with three specific use cases of ink with Unity by writing a dialogue system and creating quest structures and other branching narrative patterns. Finally, this will help you to find out how ink can be used to generate procedural storytelling patterns for Unity projects using different forms of data input. By the end of this book, you will be able to move from a simple story to an intricate Unity project using ink to power complex narrative structures.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Section 1: ink Language Basics
7
Section 2: ink Unity API
12
Section 3: Narrative Scripting with ink

Calling ink functions externally

As with variables, functions are also global in ink. This means they can be accessed as part of any ink code that is part of the same story. As part of the Unity API provided by the Story class, the EvaluateFunction() method calls a function in the ink code based on the name passed to it. Because functions in ink are global, they can be called from outside the story itself. However, unlike working with the variablesState property and only accessing a single value, multiple values can be passed to an ink function at one time. Additionally, the EvaluateFunction() method can be configured to return the text output within the ink function or any returning data, too.

In this section, we will begin by testing whether an ink function exists using the HasFunction() method. Next, we will examine how the EvaluateFunction() method is the preferred option for complex data or multiple data values when communicating between Unity and ink. Finally, we will review...