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

Conventions used

There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.

Code in text: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: "Every time the button is clicked, the Story method ChooseChoiceIndex() will be called with the correct index, and the LoadTextAndWeave() method will be called again, refreshing the value of currentLinesText and updating the current buttons shown on the screen... ."

A block of code is set as follows:

public class InkLoader : MonoBehaviour
{
    public TextAsset InkJSONAsset;
    // Start is called before the first frame update
    void Start()
    {
        Story exampleStory = new Story(InkJSONAsset.text);
    }
}

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

void Start()
{
Story exampleStory = new Story(InkJSONAsset.text);
Debug.Log(exampleStory.Continue());
Debug.Log(exampleStory.Continue());
}

Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see on screen. For instance, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in bold. Here is an example:

  1. Select the Prefab button in the project window.
  2. In the Inspector view, click on the Tag drop-down menu and then click on the Add Tag… option.

    Tips or important notes

    Appear like this.