Inkling

Limited Rust implementation of the Ink markup/scripting language for game dialog.

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 ```

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
• Nesting choices
• Simple conditionals for which choices are presented, but only for checking against how many times knots have been visited
• Tagging of lines and choices
• Optional: De/serialization of finished stories through serde

Likely candidates for further development:

• Fallback choices
• Line text variations: sequences, cycles, variables, conditionals
• 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
• Mathematics and heavy logic

Usage

See the documentation or the provided example for a minimum viable story processor. Enable serde de/serialization by activating the serialize 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!