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

Making new functions and calling knots

The Calling functions topic introduced functions for accepting input, possibly producing output, and explained how ink's built-in functions can be called.

It is also possible to create new functions in ink using the function keyword. Any new functions created in ink can be used like any others, and they are often a useful way to create separate lines of code that can be used across a project or multiple times without the need to write the same code again.

In this topic, we will explore how to create new functions using the function keyword. We will learn how they can be called, perform a small task, and even potentially return data. In Chapter 2, Knots, Diverts, and Looping Patterns, we discussed knots initially. Different sections of a story are defined by a name. In ink, functions, as we will learn, are special types of knots. This relationship means knots can also be called and passed data.

A function is created in ink using...