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 1 – Text, Flow, Choices, and Weaves

  1. The story is the content, and the narrative is the experience of it. In nonlinear storytelling, the story is potentially experienced in a different order, with each reordering creating a new narrative for the reader.
  2. ink understands flow as movement through the story as a narrative-like experience. In ink, this can "run out" when there are no paths to the end of the story.
  3. Multiple lines can be combined using glue, a combination of less-than and greater-than symbols.
  4. A weave is a collection of choices.
  5. The different types of choices are basic, often called disappearing, and sticky choices. The first can only be used once and the second multiple times, as they "stick around" across weave usages.
  6. Selective output allows an author to select what to use when shaping an option based on the text of the choice in ink. Different amounts of text can be shown to the reader based on the use of opening...