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 12: Procedural Storytelling with ink

In this chapter, we will review procedural storytelling using ink and Unity. Inkle, the company that created and maintains the narrative scripting language ink, has published multiple games that combine ink and Unity. These games use procedural storytelling to provide different experiences per session based on randomness and player choices. This chapter will introduce approaches to achieving this same general result: loading values in ink and coding collections in Unity.

In the first topic, we will review the term procedural storytelling more generally. Based on concepts initially introduced in Chapter 3, Sequences, Cycles, and Shuffling Text, we will learn how to use a shuffle in ink to create dynamic content based on simple rules.

Diving even deeper into ink, the second topic will demonstrate how to load values in ink. This process focuses on using ink to generate content for players based on simple rules.

In the final topic,...