
bic
Good and bad tools for creating branching dialogues
Hello everybody
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 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
And thank you in advance!
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AstonJ
Hey Bic, welcome to devtalk
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
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
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.
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