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 11: Quest Tracking and Branching Narratives

In this chapter, we will review how to create an ink template for quests, track multiple quests based on this template, and show the player the values of variables across quests. In the first section, we will create an ink template and its required sections. Next, we will improve the ink template and create a Quest class to track multiple quests progressing independently from each other. Finally, we will show the player the results of progressing quests and view the values of change during this progression.

Many larger or narrative-focused video games are composed of separate quests for the player to complete. This chapter will provide a template for creating quests in ink and will also show you how to access and manipulate this template in Unity. Using multiple quests, a branching narrative approach is possible by allowing a player to progress through each quest separately, as explained in this chapter.

In this chapter, we...