Preface

Dynamic Story Scripting with the ink Scripting Language teaches you an easy-to-learn narrative scripting language. Instead of needing to build an entirely new system for every project, ink allows authors to create story-driven content using a robust markup language designed for simple and advanced narrative experiences alike. Combined with the ink Unity Integration plugin, authors can work with developers to write all their story content in one language, ink, and access its variables, call functions, or move between sections of a story using code in Unity.

In this book, we will start with the ink itself. The first five chapters will walk you through how ink understands stories, manages the flow, the movement between sections of a story, and how to store and manipulate different values within a story. This will lead directly into the middle four chapters, which cover how to use the ink Unity Integration plugin and the application programming interface it provides to communicate between ink stories and Unity projects.

Finally, the last three chapters will highlight three common use cases. We will start with creating a dialogue system and review some approaches to handling data when using ink and Unity. Next, we examine how to create an advanced quest tracking system where each ink story contains a quest, but Unity is used to track values between them. The last use case will review some common terms and patterns across ink and Unity to help developers get started using procedural storytelling in their projects.