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

Working with LIST

Each use of the VAR keyword creates a single value. In many projects, a handful of single values would be enough to track anything needed while running. However, there are contexts where a set of values might be needed. For these cases, ink has a special keyword called LIST that creates a list of possible values.

The values of a list can be thought of as possible states of its variable. For example, for a LIST named days_of_week, possible values might be the 7 days of the week. These could be defined with LIST itself and then assigned as needed instead of the need to use string values for each day of the week.

In ink, a list defines a new collection of values within the context of the project. Once created, the values of a list can act as possible values for other variables using the VAR keyword.

However, while powerful in its ability to create new possible values for variables, the values that are created have some limitations and often need extra functionality...