I want our screenwriters to have a great tools, in order to be able to:
- Write dialogues/quests in a simple, human-writer-readable-writeable format;
- Quickly run and test them;
- Be able to do automated validation: dangling brancehs, branch prices/probabilities
When I searched for a dialogue engine (format + editor/prototyping tool + library) at the beginning of the project, I only paid attention to Ink and Twine.
Ink is mostly suitable for IF (interactive fiction), not CRPGs.
Twine‘s integration into game engines is mostly nonexistent, and its format is a cryptic Javascript embedded into HTML.
So, I wrote my own dialogue engine and language (see the previous post). A prototype of such, but anyway.
What happened next?
I found YarnSpinner!
- It integrates into Unity (who knows, we might end up there. Everybody uses Unity).
- The syntax is simple, and there’s a grammar definition, almost ready to be reused in my own parser.
- It has a rapid prototyping tool, too.
- It can both integrate the RPG engines’s state into its formulas, and change it by sending “command messages” to the integration API.
- And it has stuff I didn’t think about, like localization support and the above-mentioned commands.
Sigh.
I’m seriously considering throwing Talk (my dialogue DSL) away and rewriting my dialogue engine in YarnSpinner.
OTTH…
I looked for “nested Stories” tool for a bigger game, because dumping all story nodes on one screen scales pretty horribly.
Only one tool, Articy Draft, can do it. It’s a commercial tool, with an unreasonable monthly subscription cost ($60/month), but luckily, it has a once-purchaseable Steam version for $100. Much better than $60/mo.
The quest continues.