This week in BYTE, I focused largely on creating the Ink functionality of the game. I chose Ink because, in my experience, Yarn Spinner’s Unity plugin is…well…not good. Ink, to my delight, worked very seamlessly. After downloading and installing the Unity package from their Git, I just needed to copy my Ink files into the Unity assets and the plugin created the JSON file that C# API uses.

I then made the UI for the dialogue. It’s pretty straightforward right now, with just the dialogue box, character name, and indicator that you can advance, but that’s more or less all I’ll need. I also have the background image component that can theoretically be changed with the Ink script in the future, and then I’ll need to add character art pretty soon. I may need to add choices as well, but I don’t know about that yet.

Finally, I wrote the script that actually handles the Ink JSON file and makes sure that the dialogue and character names get correctly written to UI elements correctly. This was pretty straightforward; in a sense, it’s just like parsing a giant string with some fancy API functions that make it easier.

Once the Ink was all working, I did a little polishing on the battle scene. I made the enemy move faster to increase the tension (I also found that you could beat the fight without needing to use the skill, which I didn’t like), and then I added the “goal” at the opposite end of the battle map.

Once the player gets to the goal, the game will send them back to the main menu right now, but eventually, that will send them back to whatever needs to happen, I just haven’t gotten that far in the prototype yet.