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

Creating a dynamic user interface

The Story class provides multiple methods for loading and progressing a story. However, without a user interface, a player is not able to select between options and see the result. To fix this problem, additional game objects are needed to show text and provide an interface for a user to click on different things.

To start, a new project is needed. Instead of example code, this will use different user interface objects for working with a user. The project will also need to create a Prefab. In Unity, a GameObject can become prefabricated by moving it from the Hierarchy view into the Project window. This allows its settings and values to be kept as an asset in the project. Prefabs in Unity can also be instantiated, a process by which C# code can create a copy of an existing GameObject during runtime.

The current lines as returned by the ContinueMaximally() method and choices in the currentChoices property can potentially be dynamic while an ink...