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

Controlling a story through variables and functions

The variablesState property and the EvaluateFunction() method give the developer two ways in which to access values within an ink story. By using these two approaches, a story can be controlled by more than just the options that are presented to a player. User interface elements within Unity can be attached to methods that can then change ink values.

In this section, we will connect ink to Unity. By using the variablesState property and the EvaluateFunction() method, we will review a code pattern where Unity provides the user interface and communicates with ink functions to adjust and react to values during runtime.

Across the three sections of this topic, first, we will prepare a Unity project by creating the necessary game objects. Next, we will add the code to control the user interface. Finally, we will adjust the presentation of the user interface and run the project.

Preparing a user interface

To begin work with...