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

Loading a compiled ink story

In Chapter 6, Adding and Working with the ink-Unity Integration Plugin, we saw how to add new ink files to a Unity project. After importing the plugin, new files can be created using the Create menu from the Project window. When an ink source was added, the plugin automatically created a compiled JSON file. As we now move into working with the ink API provided by the plugin, we will use the created JSON files for working with a story.

The first step for working with code in Unity is to create a GameObject. This is a basic container in Unity. Each GameObject holds at least one component. The different systems in Unity, such as the rendering system (for drawing things on a screen), physics (for detecting whether two things overlap on a screen), and input (for detecting whether a user presses a button) all communicate with these components. When Unity runs a project, it sends data to components matching the system associated with it. For example, to work...