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

Working with ink files

Unity is only aware of files inside of the folders it watches. To work with other files, they must be added as new assets to an existing project. With the ink-Unity Integration plugin installed, Unity will watch all new files with the .ink file type and will automatically compile them for usage in Unity projects based on its Project Settings. However, the first step is to add these Ink source files to an existing Unity project using the plugin.

Adding ink source files

Files created with Inky are saved with the .ink file type. These are source files for projects. They are the code form of Ink stories. To work with ink in Unity, the first step is to create a new .ink file.

To create a new ink source file in Unity, open an existing project and make sure the Project window is open. (If not open, it can be re-opened using the Window menu by clicking on General and then Project.)

There are often multiple ways of doing the same thing in Unity. This applies...