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 9: Story API – Observing and Reacting to Story Events

In this chapter, we will explore how changes in a running ink story can trigger events in Unity. We will learn how the ObserveVariable() and ObserveVariables() methods of the Story API, as provided by the ink-Unity Integration plugin, allow you to prepare functions to react to future events in Unity. We will begin by observing a single variable and then move on to learn how to watch multiple values.

In Chapter 8, Story API – Accessing ink Variables and Functions, the focus was on controlling an ink story by calling its functions and changing its values from Unity. This chapter reverses the emphasis between the two systems. In this chapter, we will explore how narrative events, such as variables changing because of a player's choices, can be used to control what information is presented in Unity.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Listening for variable changes
  • Dynamically...