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

Tangling a flow in knots

In Chapter 1, Text, Flow, Choices, and Weaves, choices were explained as capable of branching a story into different sections. Some simple branching structures were shown, but movement through a story consisted of flowing down from one weave to another. When a section is given a name in ink, it becomes one of its central concepts: a knot. A knot is a section of an ink story created by using at least two equals signs (==) and the name of the knot on a single line. After this definition, every line until the next knot encountered becomes a part of the original knot. By giving names to sections, they can be navigated to within ink to create more complex narrative experiences for readers.

Creating knots

A physical book is often divided into chapters. With knots, a digital ink story can also be divided into different parts. While a novel or textbook might use names for sections based on the word chapter, digital stories can grow beyond these limitations to...