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

Tracking progress across multiple quests

In the previous section, we created an ink template for a quest and then moved into Unity to create the user interface to progress the quest using the ChoosePathString() method. This forced the flow within ink to move to a specific location. In this section, we move beyond a single quest and start tracking multiple quests at the same time. To do this, the ink template needs additional variables. For this, we will need the Quest and Dialogue classes in C#. We also will depart from using a single ink file and start using multiple files. For every quest, we will create a separate file and use the Quest class to track the progress of each in Unity with the Dialogue class, which handles creating options for a player to choose from during each step in the quest.

First, we will update the ink template with a new variable we will access later in Unity. Then, we will create the Quest and Dialogue classes in Unity. After that, we will access multiple...