Hello everyone!
We got some big news for you! Let me explain why we are so excited about it. We started to rebuild a plugin for dialogue system that could work for us.  But something on our framework was wrong. In fact the source code was pretty messy and was very complicated to use and expand. Let me explain better what i mean.

There were 2 big “.txt” files, on the right we see one contaning all the text displayed divided line by line and in the other there are all links between the single texts. Inside Unity i was just reading these files to use its data. It was working well, but as you can imagine , there are two big problems with this. Firstly, it’s not much modificable; everything is fixed on the files and to modify something you needed to be really careful on what you were doing. This means that it was not used by anyone expect the programmer. Secondly, just to add a person or a dialogue I would need to recode all the numbers to make sure everything is correct. Time needed to do that task would increase as more people are added. There is no future for a system that can’t scale accordingly to our needs.

Because of that, we rebuilded all the system, but this time we made it all inside unity. We managed to get a plugin inside unity that could handle what we wanted.

This windows can make now complex conversations using a node based framework editor.

We have only 3 types of nodes: start,  default and conditional node. Start have some data to identify the conversation in the game, default have text of npc and our answers, and conditional can branch the flow of the dialogue based on some external variable. Every node can include one or more events and can change the flow of the dialogue.

This approach can be improved to implement features like conditional answers (answer that can appear just on some occasions and many others. For now this is enough. The important thing is that the old system is now fully automatized with simple connections in just a screen. What an improvement!

The second thing we added is all the database behind people and items, so we could have everything in one single window to make it easily manageable. So now if i want to add a new character, i just need to click a button and write his/her name and a few more details.

The biggest difference from the old system is that in the old one every character who visited us was considered as a different person , instead now a character is always the same and can visit more than once (adding visits is always a one click action). On the outside, there is no difference at all, but in the inside, everything is much smoother and simpler.

Also item database improved its database so now we have every data of each item displayed in a single list. No more running a txt file to search different lines of text, which is nice!

I almost forgot to say the best part: we can add another language just by one click  in the settings tab. Texts will be replaced (but still saved) so you can translate them.

Meanwhile our programmer is d doing this beautiful system, our artist is making improvements on our characters. They are now less flat , and look at their eyes. So creepy!

Hope you will like them! Let us know !

Have a nice weekend!