Ali here, with another dev blog post from Bounty Squads! This time, it's about one of my favourite features - the Dialogue System!
This system is one I hold close to my heart, and has gone through many (many!) changes. I'm also thrilled to announce working on it together with Game Designer William Dahlberg! Together, we have been able to make it into a quick and easy system for expressing narrative through dialogue.
Please view his portfolio here to see more of his work!
NOTE: This was iteration 2.
Below are screenshots outlining a linear conversation between the player and an NPC from iteration 4.
I personally love games with strong a narrative and different narrative systems. Many games have inspired me in making this system, and as such, it has undergone five major iterations:
The next step was to make sure the system could cover the dynamics of an evolving world, with the use of branching dialogues.
Next up was making the system scaleable, and enable branching dialogue that could change in response to different in-game events.
This started by containing the dialogue in Data Tables, but was discarded due to it getting unruly when making longer dialogues.
The most recent iteration uses a graph editor, with braching nodes. All of the dialogue, camera actions, quest, animations, and NPC behaviours are adjustable inside this system - making it super slick and easy to work with.
Here's an early outtake of a branching Dialogue Tree involving a quest giver.
Finally - here's the latest version in action:
While it's far from done, I'm super pleased with how this system has progressed, and I'm so glad I got the opportunity to remake it so many times with the help and insights of other designers.
I'm also incredibly thankful that I'm lucky enough to get to collaborate with so many great people on this project.
Hope you've enjoyed this dev blog! I'm looking forward to showing you more. Thanks for reading!
