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

Combining tunnels and threads

Tunnels allow the flow of a story to move to a knot or a stitch and then return. Threads act as the inverse, moving the content from the knot or the stitch to the current flow position. Together, they form a powerful way in which to craft a story composed of different parts. Often, in advanced projects, these two concepts are paired together with weaves and gathering points to expand or contract the number of possible branches.

Tunnels can be reused, and threads can be repeated. In this topic, we will explore how threads and tunnels can be combined to create more complex stories using less overall code.

Reusing tunnels and repeating threads

Example 4 used multiple tunnels, and Example 5 showed the same result using multiple threads. It is also possible to combine multiple tunnels and threads by breaking up content into stitches as part of multiple knots for each part of a story. For example, many role-playing video games start by presenting dialogue...