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

We started this chapter by creating an ink template. By defining variables and a progress knot in ink, we can move through the various sections of a quest as individual stitches within a larger knot. Next, we looked at the ChoosePathString() method, which can forcibly move a story to a new section.

In the second section, we broke away from single files and developed a Quest class. Each object based on the Quest class contained an ink Story object based on different files and a method named Progress(), which calls the ChoosePathString() method internally. As part of this section, we learned how the Quest and Dialogue classes can help organize functionality into different classes.

Finally, we displayed the name and values of variables. First, we added new methods to detect variable changes in any quest using an events-based approach. This triggered other variables with the same name in other quests to have their values updated. Then, we added the ShowStatistics() method...