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!

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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.

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