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 worked through the process of adding a script component, associating an ink JSON file with a property, and using methods and properties as part of the Story class to progress a running ink story. We saw how the Continue() method loads one line at a time and the ContinueMaximally() method loads all text until it encounters a weave. When combined with the canContinue property, these methods allow for text content to be loaded from an ink JSON file and prevent any errors when the content runs out. With the currentChoices property, we examined how to use loops, such as those using the foreach keyword. When we used the ChooseChoiceIndex() method, we picked which option among the weave we wanted and progressed through a story using the Continue() or ContinueMaximally() methods again.

By setting up user interface game objects in Unity, we built a dynamic process to load ink story content, destroy buttons, and then create new ones. Needing to create a Button...