bic

bic

Good and bad tools for creating branching dialogues

Hello everybody :slight_smile:

I’m making a tool with the goal to help creating branching dialogues for game development. I want to make it easy to use and intuitive with the ability to export the story into different output formats. So far I think I have a solid foundation: 2 basic views for story display, very structured and scalable clean code, basic functionality to add or delete story elements.

Now I’m a little stuck because I’m not a domain expert :slight_smile: In other words I haven’t worked with dialogues for games yet (except for looking into yarn spinner, playing around with unity and unreal engine for a while and testing twine). Basically my issue is that I don’t know what tools are great and what tools are less so. Knowing what works and what doesn’t for experts would help me out a lot in figuring out what feature to implement and how to make it as intuitive and helpful as possible. The goal is to make a tool that doesn’t stand in the way of the creative process.

Maybe some of you can kick my butt in the right direction? I would greatly appreciate that :slight_smile:

And thank you in advance!

Most Liked

AstonJ

AstonJ

Hey Bic, welcome to devtalk :023:

It’s not an area I’m personally familiar with but what about looking at these:

  • Twine
  • Yarn Spinner
  • Ink (by Inkle)
  • ChatMapper

Also I’m not sure if it’s worth looking at books from @Paradox927 and @herbert, which might also contain some useful info…

Eiji

Eiji

Maybe consider my Elixir package:

With a simple and extensible DSL you can write any story and easily translate it using po files. In recent release there is lots of extra code for a session management and so on. This way you can easily write a simple game or presentation by generating a new Phoenix (web framework) based project, adding your LiveView pages and of course using the DSL and optionally translating the content.

I have even created a simple project to demonstrate how a video talk have been transformed into a presentation. You can use for example a Rust NIF to do the GUI or use wxWidgets bindings for Erlang language or even Scenic for embedded devices.

Working on HTML-based game at the very start should be simplest option and it’s also worth to mention that we have a LiveViewNative project. Let me know how that sounds for you.

Scarlet

Scarlet

You’re off to a strong start—clean, scalable code and a solid UI foundation already put you ahead of many early tools in this space. To kick you in the right direction: focus on how writers think, not just how devs structure logic. Look into what makes Twine fast for prototyping, why Ink by Inkle is praised for writer-friendly syntax, and how Yarn Spinner handles conditionals and variables intuitively. Key features to prioritize: non-linear navigation, variable tracking, previewing dialogue flow, and export options to JSON, Ink, or Yarn formats. Talk to narrative designers if you can—nothing beats real-world pain points to guide what not to do. You’re building the bridge between creativity and code—just make sure it’s one they want to cross.

Where Next?

Popular Game Dev topics Top

New
AstonJ
Saw this on Tiktok and thought it was worth sharing :laughing: #1 is pretty obvious but the rest I wasn’t aware of… Any su...
New
New
New
New
AstonJ
Seen any cool WebAssembly games? Please share them here :nerd_face:
New
AstonJ
https://www.powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle/ You have to start by entering a word (rather than just random characters) Here’s today’s (...
New
AstonJ
Inspired by this UE5 demo: Which has got to the stage now where simulations are more and more life-like -and where it feel...
New
RomanStarCoder
(Note: I said this on multiple other forums, but nobody either actually said anything, or the mods don’t approve me. I’m just wondering f...
New
RobertRichards
Hair Salon Games for Girls Fun Girls Hair Saloon game is mainly developed for kids. This game allows users to select virtual avatars to ...
New

Other popular topics Top

ohm
Which, if any, games do you play? On what platform? I just bought (and completed) Minecraft Dungeons for my Nintendo Switch. Other than ...
New
axelson
I’ve been really enjoying obsidian.md: It is very snappy (even though it is based on Electron). I love that it is all local by defaul...
New
Exadra37
I am thinking in building or buy a desktop computer for programing, both professionally and on my free time, and my choice of OS is Linux...
New
AstonJ
Curious to know which languages and frameworks you’re all thinking about learning next :upside_down_face: Perhaps if there’s enough peop...
New
AstonJ
I ended up cancelling my Moonlander order as I think it’s just going to be a bit too bulky for me. I think the Planck and the Preonic (o...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Tailwind CSS is an exciting new CSS framework that allows you to design your site by composing simple utility classes to create complex e...
New
Exadra37
I am asking for any distro that only has the bare-bones to be able to get a shell in the server and then just install the packages as we ...
New
AstonJ
Saw this on TikTok of all places! :lol: Anyone heard of them before? Lite:
New
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Develop, deploy, and debug BEAM applications using BEAMOps: a new paradigm that focuses on scalability, fault tolerance, and owning each ...
New