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

Chapter 7: Unity API – Making Choices and Story Progression

This chapter begins with reviewing how to add a script component to a game object in Unity. By creating a script component associated with a C# file, code can be written to load the compiled JSON files created by the ink-Unity Integration plugin from ink source files as part of the Unity scene. Next, we will examine how to load an ink story and start to progress through it. We will see how to programmatically make selections of options presented by ink and then how to continue story progression as a result. We will end with an example of a common approach of presenting multiple user interface elements to a player in Unity. A user will be able to click buttons in Unity and guide story progression in a running ink story.

In this chapter, we will cover the following main topics:

  • Loading a compiled ink story
  • Selecting options programmatically
  • Creating a dynamic user interface