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

Nesting alternatives

Sequences, cycles, and shuffles can all be nested inside each other. When this happens, the combined form is what is known as a nested alternative, where one alternative appears as the element of another.

Combining cycles and shuffles

Within a looping structure, a cycle can be very useful to repeat content after a certain number of loops. When combined with a shuffle, random content can be selected from the shuffle and then repeated within the larger cycle. For example, to generate a new random number for each loop, a cycle with a single element using multiple shuffles would produce this effect using only one line of code:

Her hands were sweating, and her head hurt. She just needed to enter the correct digits into the controls and the vault would open. Once she got in and away with the treasure inside, she could be done with this job and leave this life behind. She had sworn there would only be one more job like this one job ago. This was...