Inkling

Partial implementation of the Ink markup language for game dialogue.

Ink is a creation of Inkle. For more information about the language, see their website.

Using Ink you can easily write a story or create a dialog tree.

*   Branching is very simple[]: <>
    just start your line with an asterix or plus marker.
    Want nested choices? Add more markers!
    * *     A branching choice contains all information below it
            of the same level or higher.
            * * *       [I see.]
    * *     Pretty cool, huh?
    - -     Use gather points like this to return all nested choices <>
            to a single path.
    * *     [Cool!] -> fin

*   You can organize the story using knots <>
    and divert (move) to them, like this:
    -> next_knot

=== next_knot ===
Simple and fun.
-> fin

=== fin ===
Ink is very powerful and has a lot more features than shown here. <>
Do note that `inkling` only implements a subset of all its features. <>
Hopefully more in the future!
-> END

Why inkling?

• Simple interface for walking through branching stories or dialog trees
• Designed to slot into an external framework: like Inkle's implementation this is not a stand alone game engine, just a processor that will feed the story text and choices to the user
• Rust native, no wrestling with Unity or C# integration
• Support for non-latin alphabets in identifiers
• Few dependencies: currently only serde as an optional dependency to de/serialize stories, probably rand as maybe-optional in the future.

Why not inkling?

• Fewer features than Inkle's implementation of the language
• Untested in serious work loads and large scripts
• Not even alpha status, what is this???

Features

Currently and likely for the foreseeable future the feature set is very limited compared to Inkle's own implementation. Available features are:

• Knots, stitches, glue and diverts, ie. basic story structure
• Choices, of sticky and non-sticky kinds, plus fallback choices
• Nesting choices and gather points
• Line text alternative sequences (sequences, cycle, once-only) and conditions
• Conditionals for displaying text and choices to user
• Tagging of lines and choices
• Variables in choices, conditions and text
• Optional: De/serialization of finished stories through serde

Likely candidates for further development:

• Variable modification in scripts
• Includes of other files

Difficult features for which I doubt my skill level to implement:

• Advanced flow control: tunnels and threads
• Verifying that all story branches are complete

Usage

See the documentation or provided example for a minimum viable story processor. Enable serde de/serialization by activating the serde_support feature. This feature derives Deserialize and Serialize for all required structs.

Contributions

Writing this has mostly been for fun and to create a simple game, hence the lack of features. Contributions are welcome!