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

Calling functions

Functions are a foundational part of most programming languages. In ink, a function is a subset of code that can accept input separated by commas, may produce output, and can be accessed through an operation called calling.

A function is called by using its name and then opening (() and closing ()) parentheses. The operation of calling a function in ink temporarily moves the flow of the story to the code of a function and then returns it when the code finishes.

Note

Functions can only be called when used within code in ink. This means they either appear within opening and closing curly brackets or on lines starting with the tilde (~) as part of variable reassignment.

In this topic, we will start by reviewing some functions that are built into ink and how they can help us with common operations. Next, we will look at functions that have been designed to work exclusively with values created with the LIST keyword. These functions perform common operations...