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As our game is a visual narrative, our priority is being able to tell the story. While Unity does provide systems to do this manually, we looked into using ‘Ink’ to be integrated into our project to make adding dialogue easy. The software ‘Inky’ has proved to work efficiently with making quick edits to our existing scripts and provide the story we wish to tell. Best of all, it is free to use!
The software is easy to download and get running in our project.
ink - inkle's narrative scripting language
The files included the editing program and example projects to experiment with. Even though we were new to this, it was incredibly easy to pick up. Similarly to Twine, inputing multiple choices was simple in Inky and only required getting familiar with the code functions.
Inky Example from their website.
With this system, we could import our current progress in Twine (which is accessible in our Itch!) and make a few adjustments to have it work the same way in the project. As the editing program allows you to test the choices on the fly, it was easy to look for any mistakes and change them.
How Ink looks in Unity.
So far we have a very basic window for our Ink dialogue. Each ‘JSON’ file (the format that Inky uses) are implemented into the Unity Inspector and can be customised from there. We wanted to use a window that allows the art to still be seen in the background, but we will continue to make updates as the art progresses. We want to improve the text font and colour in due course. Overall however, the ‘First Day’ parts 1 and 2 are ready to be played in the game. We plan on adding the rest with their completion as soon as possible.
Our Inky project.