Stories with Maps
Chapter 2: Your First Story
Setting the Scene
Playable stories written in Ink need a beginning. So do lessons.
So before you begin writing your first scene, why not take a moment to play “Your First Scene”!
Once you are through, you can download the file: Your First Scene.ink and open it in Inky. We will be referencing this story throughout the lesson.
Learning Objectives
- To differentiate between Knots and Stitches, and be able create and name them using the correct command syntax;
- To understand Diverts, and to generate Diverts using the correct command syntax;
- To differentiate between Basic Choices and Sticky Choices;
- To generate Choices using the correct command syntax;
- To differentiate between Choice Text and Output Text, and to utilize Mixed Output commands in order to generate both.
Knots
are the largest units of an Ink story. They are typically bigger than paragraphs or pages (or screens), and they may contain several of both. However, it seems inappropriate to compare them to something as large as chapters. A chapter of a story might necessitate multiple knots. Perhaps it is best to think of them as scenes in a playscript.
As you will see, knots are, well… knots. They are the intersection of multiple , or perhaps they are bumps along a single thread. They are what you will build your stories out of. In “Your First Scene,” there is exactly one knot.
Skip line 1 for now; we want to look at line 2. It reads:
=== Your_First_Scene ===
The “===” (three equal signs) at the beginning of the line is your first piece of command syntax. Syntax, or “markup,” refers to the symbols or codes that communicate directly with the computer and are not meant to be seen by the reader.
In this case, using two or more equal signs (=) to begin the line tells the editor that you are creating a new knot. Using Inky, you can generate a pre-written knot snippet from the drop-down menu Ink > Basic Structure > Knot (main section).
Incidentally, the syntax:
==Your_First_Scene
will perform the same task as line 2 as it is written in the screenshot above. It will tell the machine to create a new knot named “Your_First_Scene”. While the above syntax is valid, the example in Illustration 5 (above) and the pre-written knot snippet (see Illustration 6 below) use three equal signs before and after the name of the knot, and we recommend that you follow this convention when using Ink (as we will in this book). This should be considered best practice for clarity and consistency: it helps to make knots more easily identifiable when writing longer works.
A NOTE ON NAMING: There is a universal naming convention, used for many elements in an Ink story, including knot names. There are three rules.
- The name may contain letters (capital and lower-case) and numbers
- The name may not contain spaces
- The name may not contain special characters other than the underscore (_)
Knots in Ink are bound by this naming convention. You could name the knot “YourFirstSce