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

Summary

In this chapter, we explored three different approaches to dialogue systems. In the first approach, we worked through hashtags and speech tags. In ink, we can add a hashtag to the end of a line. This allows you to add extra information per line such as the speaker for a line of dialogue or which media file to play for the line. With speech tags, a colon (:) can be added in front of the dialogue to mark the speaker. The speech tag helps with testing with Inky but requires more C# code in Unity. Hashtags and speech tags can be combined in various contexts where the hashtag can represent the media file or additional data for the developer whereas the speech tag contains who is communicating the line.

In the second approach, we zoomed out from the line-by-line emphasis with tags to the structures within ink. To replicate a click-to-continue pattern, we can combine a knot and the use of tunnels in ink. This is also true of dialogue trees, which we can break out into their own...