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

Summary

In this chapter, we learned more about how variables work, and how they can be created using the VAR keyword. With multiple types of data, variables must be created using static values. They can then be changed through an operation called assignment using lines starting with a tilde (~) for writing a single line of code.

In the second topic, for the cases where we needed multiple values, we saw that the LIST keyword can be used. This keyword allows us to create values other variables can use, but also comes with the limitations that only values created with LIST can be used with a list. We also examined how all the values of a list are part of a Boolean set and have either true or false values upon creation.

Next, in the third topic, we investigated how functions work in ink. With several built-in functions, we can create random numbers or convert between types of numbers. With LIST values, we compared the results of LIST_COUNT() and LIST_ALL() by examining how to change...