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

Dynamically responding to ink stories

In Unity, multiple methods are called as part of the normal execution cycle when a project runs. Often, methods such as Update(), a common part of behavior scripts in Unity, include many lines of code. Even a method such as FixedUpdate(), called at the end of the physics calculations for each cycle in a running project, might include multiple parts. Any code that depends on other systems, such as those communicating with ink, can also add extra time per cycle.

The use of the ObserveVariable() method allows data from ink to only update Unity when needed. Because the Story API will only call the delegated function when necessary, Unity will also only get the data when there is a change it needs to know about when it needs to know about it. This will also happen outside the use of an Update() method or even a FixedUpdate() method in Unity.

In this section, we will examine how the ObserveVariable() method operates outside of other methods as...