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

In this chapter, we looked at the seemingly simple concept of alternatives. In ink, the three types of alternatives are sequences, cycles, and shuffles. Each provides a different way of accessing its elements. Sequences show each element in turn until its last one. Cycles repeat their elements, looping back to the first element after encountering the end. Shuffles select a random element from their set each time they are run, creating a way to introduce randomness to stories for the first time.

Alternatives can also be expressed in both one-line and multi-line forms. When written in their longer multi-line forms, alternatives use a keyword for their type and have each element on a separate line. While much easier to read for an author, we reviewed how care must be taken to incorporate glue because of how ink interprets each line of text in a story.

Finally, we learned alternatives can be combined in a nested form. An element of an alternative can be another alternative...