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

Adjusting plugin settings

The ink-Unity Integration plugin comes with multiple settings that can be changed depending on the needs of the Unity project. This topic will review how to find the Project Settings window and update a common option – automatic re-compilation.

Finding ink-Unity Integration settings

The Ink-Unity Integration plugin comes with default settings. These can be changed by editing them as part of Project Settings:

  1. Click on Edit and then Project Settings:
    Figure 6.17 – Edit menu with Project Settings… selected

    Figure 6.17 – Edit menu with Project Settings… selected

  2. Click on Ink from the sidebar options to see the related settings for the project.

Figure 6.18 – Ink Project Settings in Unity

In the next section, we will use the Project Settings window to update a common setting, the automatic re-compilation of ink source files.

Updating automatic re-compilation

If a project has a large ink source file or many different smaller files each using...