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

Pulling on threads

Diverts were introduced as pointing to their destination. To create a tunnel, a hyphen and a greater-than symbol were combined, ->, on either side of the name of the knot or stitch. However, diverts can point inward as well. When a divert is created with a less-than symbol and a hyphen, <-, it becomes a different concept called a thread. Instead of moving the flow to the destination, ink threads the destination's text or code into another location.

In this section, we will work with threads to collapse more complex weaves into simpler structures. Instead of multiple levels of choices and their text outcomes, we will use threads to achieve the same result in a more efficient way.

Making threads

Often, threads are considered to be an inverse of diverts. Instead of the flow moving to the section of the story, the section of the story moves to the current position of the flow. Returning to the code from Example 4, threads can be used in multiple places...