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 introduced you to knots, sections of a story, and diverts, which are ways to move between them. We examined the use of DONE and END as built-in knots to end a flow (DONE) and stop a story completely (END). Stitches, subsections of a knot, were then discussed to break up a story into even more parts. We learned that the INCLUDE keyword can be used to break a story into separate files and be included as part of the same project.

Knots can divert to themselves. This, as we saw, is the key to creating looping structures where the use of other concepts, labeled and conditional options, can also be combined. Labels allow us to create variables for tracking how many times an option has been shown. Labeled options then led on to using conditional options, testing how many times an option has been chosen when using a looping structure. Finally, we ended with making a dynamic weave, using a looping structure where each choice made changed the values of labels and unlocked...