Hello Everyone,
For a while I have been looking for a high quality, easy to use, non-linear dialog editor. I have seen a few attempts to make some software like this, but I don't think they ever quite reached their potential. I would like to develop some new software with the most current tools (Visual Studio, .NET 3.0, C#) to make a nice looking and functional non-linear dialog editor. I read
this paper, which sparked my interesting in developing this and I am hoping to get all of your feedback on some ideas and features to add.
There has been a lot of debate and it is still common to develop some sort of dialog tree to sort out conversations, but these trees can get out of hand very quickly with too many branches to keep track of. I would ideally like to develop a system that is easy to look at and friendly for non-technical designers to write complex dialog. Here are features that I thought of, so please add your ideas below and credit will be given in the final product where it is due. Thanks so much!
- Sleek and user-friendly UI (similar to Celtx pre-production software)
- Conversation visualization as graph or tree
- Define conditions for certain dialog options to appear (e.g. never talked to this person, has a certain inventory item, etc.)
- Define how a dialog selection affects the player-NPC relationship (e.g. the NPC may become more hostile in general if poor dialog choices are selected, which affects future interactions)
- Link production files to dialog entries (e.g. audio files, lip sync files, etc.)
- Import from linear scripts and automatically generate scripted dialog for a number of game engines (we are using Wintermute)
- Conversation simulation mode to test dialog flow
Thanks again for reading!
-Ben
