stargazing-dino/blade-ink-rs

Inkle Ink runtime implementation in Rust

Blade Ink

This is a Rust port of Inkle's Ink, a scripting language for writing interactive narratives.

bladeink is fully compatible with the reference version and supports all its language features.

To learn more about the Ink language, you can check the official documentation.

Using the bladeink library crate

Here is a quick example that uses basic features to play an Ink story using the bladeink crate.

// story is the entry point of the `bladeink` lib.
// json_string is a string with all the contents of the .ink.json file.
let mut story = Story::new(json_string)?;

loop {
    while story.can_continue() {
        let line = story.cont()?;

        println!("{}", line);
    }

    let choices = story.get_current_choices();
    if !choices.is_empty() {
        // read_input is a method that you should implement
        // to get the choice selected by the user.
        let choice_idx = read_input(&choices)?;
        // set the option selected by the user
        story.choose_choice_index(choice_idx)?;
    } else {
        break;
    }
}

The bladeink library supports all the Ink language features, including threads, multi-flows, variable set/get from code, variable observing, external functions, tags on choices, etc. Examples of uses of all these features can be found in the lib/tests folder in the source code.

Running Ink stories with binkplayer

The Blade Ink project includes a program to run Ink stories in your terminal.

You can install it from crates.io:

$ cargo install binkplayer
$ binkplayer <your_story.ink.json>

Or, if you download the source code repository, you can run cargo build in the workspace root folder, the binkplayer binary will be compiled and found in target/debug. You can play any .ink.json (Ink compiled files).

In the inkfiles folder you can find many Ink test stories to test the Ink language capabilities. And also we have The Intercept, a full featured story created by Inkle, also included in the inkfiles folder. You can run The Intercept running the next command in your console.

$ target/debug/binkplayer inkfiles/TheIntercept.ink.json

Using Blade Ink in C

There are C bindings available to use Blade Ink in your C projects. Check it out here.