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

Looping knots

A knot can divert to itself. This fundamental concept is an important part of the advanced dialog and narrative structures in ink. However, care must be taken when having knots divert to themselves or in a looping pattern. It can become very easy to create infinite loops where the code loops without stopping. To prevent this error, it is always a good idea to include a weave with at least one choice whose content ends the story or breaks the loop.

By combining choices, diverts, and knots, looping structures can be created. Within these structures, sticky choices become important for creating consistent options for readers to choose from during each loop.

Looping structures

The most basic looping structure has two choices. The first continues the loop and the second must end the story somehow, as illustrated in the following code example:

You look at the rock in front of you.
-> rock
== rock
* Push the rock up the hill.
    ...