Rpg dialog maker how to#
Rpg dialog maker code#

I understand the question is for your own edification but, it should be pointed out that, in industry, when we solve these types of problems our end users (the people utilizing the technology we're developing) are not engineers.Ī system like this (branching dialogue) requires a representation in a tool that is relatively intuitive to use. Now and again you get a technical artist or technical designer, and they're wonderful and don't mind it but, the majority of content authors are not technically inclined. They will not (this is very important) look at code. In game development, it's the content developers that we programmers want to empower.

Rpg dialog maker code#

Indeed, the code examples above are coupled to code, not content. We're having a discussion that relates to a programmer performing the task.

It's interesting, there's seems to be a core idea being missed here. If all conditions are met, the response is available.

You can add as many conditions in there as you need, as long as they can be easily specified with one or two values.

Get thyself aįarm hand or stable boy to do thy bidding! Sadly squire, my time is too valuable for the likes of thee. Then just refer to a condition by name in the conversation script.Ī more advanced scheme, still not requiring a scripting language, might use a tag for each condition, like so: What if you have no scripting language? Well, you could have the programmer code an individual condition for each situation in your dialogue - a bit tedious, not all that difficult if your dialogue is written up-front. In your scripting language, you'd need a 'rats_left_in_world' function that you can call to retrieve the value in question. Nay, brother! Had thou but ten rats remaining, my sword would be thine, Verily! Naught could be better than slaying thy verminous foes. The easiest way is to do this with a scripting language, so you have a short and simple piece of code that returns True if this response is available to the player and False if it is not.Ĭouldst thou venture forth and kill me 10 rats, perchance? So the next step is to add the conditionals in there, by simply attaching conditions to each response. I assume each dialogue may consist of the text spoken by the NPC, followed by a list of responses available to the player. Let's say you have your list of dialogues, numbered 1 to 400 or whatever like the Choose Your Own Adventure book examples. You simply factor the conditionals into the data. As more of a designer than a programmer, I'm always interested in ways to separate content and code. I don't believe there's a single solution, but it'd be good to get the ball rolling with some ideas.

Rpg dialog maker how to#

I'm looking for ideas (not necessarily programming language examples) of how to approach all of this dialogue and logic, and separate it out so that it's very easy to add new branching content, without delving into too much code. However, tying in logic to work out if the player has certain items, and completed certain quests seems to really ruin this script based model. In particular, I'm curious about dialogue and events based actions.įor example: If I approach an NPC at point x in the game, with items y and quests z, how would I work out what the NPC needs to say? Branching dialogue and responding to player input seems as trivial as having a defined script, and user input causes the script reader to jump to a particular line in the script, which has a corresponding set of response lines (much like a choose your own adventure)

I've always been interested in the data structures involved in an RPG (Role-Playing Game).