ink-iOS

An iOS wrapper, written in Objective C, for the JavaScript port of Inkle's Ink, a scripting language for writing interactive narrative.

Inkle offers Unity integration, but no direct way to use the Ink runtime in a native iOS app. Yannick Lohse has ported the runtime to JavaScript. This wrapper provides an Objective C class named InkStory that drives the JavaScript runtime via iOS's JSContext.

Installation

Clone the repository from GitHub and add InkStory.m and InkStory.h to your Xcode project.

Then grab the latest version of ink.js (the JavaScript Ink runtime library) from Yannick's latest release. Add this to your Xcode project too.

ink-iOS works from the compiled JSON file produced by Inkle's tools. Add your JSON file to your Xcode project.

Quickstart

There is an example InkTestViewController in /sample. It's pretty basic and the layout is intentionally horrible, but it shows the basic requirements for getting things running.

The pertinent parts:

#import "InkStory.h"

…

InkStory *inkStory = [[InkStory alloc] initWithStoryJsonFile:@"story.json"];

The main loop:

while ([inkStory canContinue] == YES)
{
    NSString *paragraphText = [inkStory continueStory];

    // Append paragraphText to your text view
}

for (NSDictionary *choice in [inkStory currentChoices])
{
    NSString *choiceTitle = [choice objectForKey:@"text"];
    NSInteger choiceIndex = [[choice objectForKey:@"index"] integerValue];

    // Create UIButtons, or whatever, for the available options
    // Stash the choiceIndex in its tag field or similar 
}

When a choice is selected:

[inkStory chooseChoiceIndex:choiceButton.tag]; // The associated choiceIndex
[self storyLoop]; // Run the main loop again

Limitations

This is a very early version of this wrapper. I plan to use it on a project and will keep this repository updated as I make improvements to it.

For differences between the original C# API and the underlying JavaScript API, see here.