inkling

Limited implementation of the Ink markup language

23 releases

0.12.5 Sep 11, 2020
0.12.4 Aug 18, 2020
0.12.3 Aug 13, 2019
0.11.7 Aug 4, 2019
0.9.3 Jul 12, 2019

#361 in Game dev

Parity-6.0.0 AND Apache-2.0

570KB
12K SLoC

Inkling

crates.io Documentation

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! See CONTRIBUTING.md for more details.

License

Inkling is copyleft, licensed under the Parity License and Apache-2.0. See LICENSE.md for more details.

Dependencies