The next step was to write a Unity importer for Inklewriter’s output json. Overall, it’s a smart tool made by developers who’ve done a lot of interactive storytelling themselves. The interface is simple but powerful, and I can share fully playable dialog sequences with others before we push it into the game. It supports named variables, conditional branches, divert nodes (where dialog flow is diverted to another node in the middle of playback), and can output json. It was written as a Twine competitor, I think, but the feature set was just the right fit for DEAD SECRET CIRCLE. In the end I went with Inklewriter, a web-based tool that allows you to quickly lay out (and play through) branching dialog trees. Though there are a lot of tools out there, it was hard to find something that matched my needs and powerful enough to justify not writing something myself. I even realized that I wrote a markup syntax for branching dialog a decade ago that I’ve never used for anything. Chat Mapper is a very serious–and very complicated-looking–tool that has an order of magnitude more features than I need. I looked at Yarn, a Twine-like editor built for Night In the Woods. There are a number of tools available for creating branching dialog trees. For me, the hardest part of this system is actually writing the dialog itself, so I needed a toolchain that would let me quickly edit and revise. For our system, I was interested in finding or building tools that would help me explore the flow of the dialog, and its various branches, in real-time as I was editing. But even in the implementation of a straightforward branching conversation system can be fairly complicated. As you explore the world you periodically interview suspects, and depending on your choices the conversation can go many different ways.īranching dialog systems are pretty common, and ours is not particularly exotic. One of the new systems we’ve built for DEAD SECRET CIRCLE is a branching dialog system.
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