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

Chapter 8: Story API – Accessing ink Variables and Functions

In this chapter, we will discuss how to use the ink Unity API to work with variables and functions. Any variables or functions defined in ink can be accessed from any point in its code. The API provided by the ink-Unity Integration plugin provides an interface through its variablesState property to access any defined variables. This is also true of a method provided by the EvaluateFunction() API, which can access any functions defined in the ink code. Understanding this functionality is key to creating more complex projects by using the ink-Unity Integration plugin as a bridge between an ink story and Unity code.

In this chapter, we will cover the following main topics:

  • Changing ink variables outside a story
  • Calling ink functions externally
  • Controlling a story through variables and functions