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 10: Dialogue Systems with ink

In this chapter, we will explore three different approaches to create a dialogue system using ink, Unity, and the ink-Unity Integration plugin. In the first topic, we will begin by examining how hashtags, that is, text content starting with a hash (#), can be used to mark different lines in ink as being associated with certain characters in a story. Then, we will discuss an alternative to tags, where the name of the speaker precedes their dialogue. Finally, we will conclude the first part by reviewing how tags can be used and how both approaches can be combined.

In the second topic, we will look at how to recreate the click-to-continue dialogue pattern that is found in many video games using ink. We will explore various ways of saving time and effort by using tunnels to move to different knots and back again in an ink project for use when needed. Following this, we will examine several different ways in which to generate dialogue trees in ink...