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

Chapter 4: Variables, Lists, and Functions

This chapter builds on multiple concepts that were introduced in Chapter 2, Knots, Diverts, and Looping Patterns. In the first topic, we will examine how the keyword VAR works with a single value in ink, and how it can be combined with alternatives. Once values have been saved, they can be changed as part of larger looping structures. In the second topic, we will work with multiple variables together using the LIST keyword.

In ink, we can group variables into a concept called a list. We will also examine how to create and change the values that are part of a list. We will then review when they are best used in a project and situations where multiple, single variables might work better. This discussion will move us on to the next topic, where we will look at working with functions.

Values that are part of a list can be changed by other concepts called functions. In the third topic, we will call some of the built-in functions to work with...