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

Summary

In this chapter, we began by demonstrating how the variablesState property exposes all of the variables in ink. We started by using the GetVariableWithName() method to access variables by name and the provided shorthand syntax of using square brackets. For completeness, the variablesState property was explained. However, in most situations, ink functions should change ink values. This helps to keep any code working with those values existing within the ink story and is easier to maintain over time, and we closed the chapter on this same theme. Additionally, we explored how buttons in Unity can call their methods and then call ink functions. By using the EvaluateFunction() method, we can access the ink function in Unity to either pass data into the project or retrieve possible text output with the out keyword in C#.

In Chapter 9, Story API – Observing and Reacting to Story Events, we will emphasize the ink-Unity Integration plugin and its API by inspecting a different...