Good and bad tools for creating branching dialogues

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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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Hey Bic, welcome to devtalk :023:

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

  • Twine :
    • Simple, node-based interface for creating branching narratives.
    • Low barrier to entry for beginners.
    • Export options for HTML or custom formats.
  • Yarn Spinner :
    • Script-based approach with a focus on readability and simplicity.
    • Integrates well with Unity.
    • Supports variables and conditional logic.
  • Ink (by Inkle) :
    • Text-based scripting with powerful features like dynamic text generation and state tracking.
    • Optimized for performance in large-scale games.
    • Used in AAA titles like Heaven’s Vault .
  • ChatMapper :
    • Visual, node-based editor with advanced features like variable tracking and conditional branching.
    • Popular for RPGs and visual novels.

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