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

Making a quest count

In narrative terms, a quest is a series of events connected to a character within a story. In video games, quests are a sequence of connected events experienced by the player. In role-playing games, a quest might include unlocking a weapon, rescuing a prince, or defeating some great evil. Each point along the way is a step of the quest. Translated in terms of story and code, a quest can be thought of as a series of steps where the resolution of each step unlocks the next.

ink supports this pattern of smaller parts within a larger whole as stitches within a knot. Thought of in this way, each step of the quest can become its own stitch within the code, with the outcome of each stitch being able to move to the next within the larger structure. Using LIST in ink also allows us to define the steps we want by name, with a special knot progressing the player from one stitch to the next within the quest structure.

In this section, we will learn how to design a quest...