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

Chapter 7 – Unity API – Making Choices and Story Progression

  1. The Continue() method only loads a single line of ink text content and the next weave it encounters each time it is called. The ContinueMaximally() method loads all text content until it encounters a weave or the end of the story.
  2. The ChooseChoiceIndex() method expects an int value within the range of the total number of entries in the currentChoices property in the Story class.
  3. The canContinue property is a Boolean value. If there is more story content, it will be true. Otherwise, it will be false. The canContinue property should always be checked as part of a conditional statement before using the Continue() or ContinueMaximally() methods to prevent either method from throwing an error.
  4. A prefab is a GameObject instance saved as an asset in Unity. Any game object used as part of the Hierarchy view can be saved as an asset by dragging it into the Project window. A copy of a prefab can be created...