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

Dialogue loops and story knots

Writing dialogue in ink often means being aware of how it will be used with other systems. In the previous section, we investigated two approaches to using tags when writing single lines of dialogue. In this topic, we will move away from a focus on individual lines and work with the larger structures within an ink project. By inspecting two common patterns in which to present choices to a player, we will learn how knots in ink can be reused within projects to save future time and effort. The last section in this topic also includes advice for starting a new project or converting it using ink.

Because it appears most often, we will begin with a pattern that appears in the Writing dialogue in ink using tags section as part of the ink code examples using tags: click to continue.

Click to continue

Reminder

The completed project for this section can be found inside the Chapter 10 examples on GitHub under the name of Chapter10-ClickToContinue. Only...