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

Loading values into ink

The procedural aspect of procedural storytelling can exist either primarily in ink or Unity. In this topic, we will examine the process of loading values into ink. We will center a design focused on letting ink make procedural decisions about what content a user might see or interact with during a play session.

In the first section, Substitution grammars, we will consider how to use what we learned in the previous section, Introducing procedural storytelling in ink, to build a set of possible events for a player. This will lead us into the next section, Story planning, where we will apply rules to the grammars themselves. This will allow us to control how different sets of encounters are influenced by previous ones, creating simple formulas for complex stories.

Substitution grammars

In linguistics, grammar describes the rules that define how a language works. For example, in English, there is a specific order of subject, verb, and object in sentences...