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

Using alternatives

In Chapter 2, Knots, Diverts, and Looping Patterns, the use of opening, {, and closing, }, curly brackets signaled the use of a conditional option. Between using labels and conditions, options could become dynamic and react to the reader making choices between loops. However, curly brackets are used for more than conditional options. In ink, they also signal the use of any code, and one of the most common forms of code is the use of an alternative. Used to create different text effects and react to loops, alternatives separate each of their elements by a vertical bar, |. Depending on the type of alternative used, different text effects can happen.

Sequences

The first and default alternative is a sequence. As its name might suggest, a sequence is a series of values. They are accessed based on their name, in sequence:

It was a {dark and stormy night|bright and shining day}.

In Example 1, a sequence is used. It has two elements, dark and stormy...