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

Selecting options programmatically

Displaying only the text of an ink story has limited usefulness. Most advanced ink stories use weaves to present different options. Along with the Continue() method and the canContinue property, the Story API also has another property called currentChoices that contains a list of the options generated by the most recent weave.

As was demonstrated in the Checking whether a story can continue section, the canContinue property is affected by the Continue() method. After each line is loaded and returned as a string, the Story class will update the canContinue property if there is more story to load. This is also true of the currentChoice property. When the Continue() method is used, it will load the next line and any weaves.

Note 

Any previously used game objects or C# files created as part of this chapter can safely be deleted. This section will create a new game object and script component, and use different code for working with weaves...