Branching Dialogue Trees?
Branching Dialogue Trees?
Hey I've been wondering what you all use to create and manage dialogue trees for your games. I've come across many tools for the different engines. Most fall in the low-code node-graph category that I find frustrating and finnicky to work with. I never got the hang of the different plugins for Godot, and it's tiring to just spam and duplicate if statements in huge globs.
I made a C# package to let me map out dialogue trees and shoot events all in neat little yaml files that live happily in version control. It was made abstract to work for MUDs and text adventures, but I recently started using it in my Godot games and it works pretty well.
I don't believe I'm the only one that prefers to work this way. I am curious about what you all use for branching dialogue mechanics, reacting to events during dialogue, SFX etc.
Do you like the plugins? Do you have bottomless branches of flow control? Let me know!
The only one I've looked at for godot 4 is https://nathanhoad.itch.io/godot-dialogue-manager, which is a bit more code-focused than something like Dialogic I think. I messed around with it a little and it seems decent, although idk how well it will scale. They do have quite a few different examples though and I was able to adapt it into a basic point-and-click style, so it seems pretty flexible.
I generally don't like plug-ins. I am not a strong enough coder to read others code well and understand what is going on. If I get stuck it feels like I don't even know where the problem is.
So I generally make everything myself. My released game had a simple dialog system they I stored all the dialogs in a resource file in a big dictionary. Then when I needed one I would just ask for that dictionary entry. Each dialog was set, but I could call a few different dialogs based on which characters you had, or inventory.
There was some duplicated likes of code, but not too much.