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

This chapter provided you with an explanation of the term story, content, and the narrative, what the reader might experience from its content. We examined nonlinear storytelling as how the parts of a story can be experienced in an order different than how they were written or originally composed. Next, we learned about branching narratives as a description of experiencing a nonlinear story where different sequences, branches, are explored over others. Through using code (scripting), we saw how different narratives can be created by controlling when the reader experiences story content.

ink is a narrative scripting language. We understand the movement through a story as a concept called flow. We discovered that each intersection, created by using different types of choices, is known as a weave. By using choices, we saw that different layers of a weave and more branching are possible. For situations where a weave is growing too complex, we can use a gathering point. This collapses a weave into a single point or line.

In the next chapter, we will begin to use knots, labeled sections of a story, and diverts, moving between these, to build on the concepts of nonlinear storytelling and branching narratives. We will start to use choices to move the reader to a particular knot or repeat the same weave again.