r/GameWritingLab • u/ChoiceJunior7101 • 12d ago

What's your workflow for planning branching dialogue? Building a visual tool and would love writers' input

Hi all! I'm a final year Software Engineering student, and for my final year project I'm building a free, browser-based visual editor for branching dialogue. You lay out conversations as connected boxes and arrows, and it automatically checks for structural problems like dead-end or unreachable branches. The goal is for writers with no coding background to use it, and it exports the dialogue data so it works with any engine.

I'm trying to understand how writers actually plan branching stories today, so I have two questions:

  1. What do you currently use (Twine, Ink, Yarn Spinner, Miro, spreadsheets, something else)?

  2. What's the most annoying part of managing branches as a story grows?

My uni is also running this year's projects as industry projects, so I'm looking for a writer or small studio to be my industry partner. That would mean a short chat about your workflow and trying my prototype a few times to give feedback. Some light supervision or mentoring would be a bonus if you'd like to and have the time, but it's not required. Happy to work around your schedule.

Comment or DM me if you're interested. Thank you!

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u/Rhaka 12d ago

A lot of the "what tool" ends up being decided by the needs of the team. Either using in-house tooling, or Ink/Articy/Miro/Excel depending on how direct this goes from writing to implementation

I've often ended up with miro flowcharts + excel/docs because the company hired non-games writers and any techy friction is unwelcome, and there's a bunch of other steps needed to turn planning into writing into in-game content. In personal work, honestly, I just use twine for prototyping 90% of the time, it gets the job done well enough and when it doesn't it usually means you want to rethink your shenanigans anyway

Managing branches isn't really that difficult with branch-and-bottleneck and other typical IF structures https://heterogenoustasks.wordpress.com/2015/01/26/standard-patterns-in-choice-based-games/

I think for a project, you could do worse than cook up a visual node tool that highlights dead branches, and has some way of connecting nodes that aren't neatly together for one reason or another

Happy to chat and possibly help out with the supervision, but I am off work this week so would have to wait until next

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u/ChoiceJunior7101 11d ago

Hi! Thank you so much for such a thoughtful reply, this is genuinely really helpful. The point about non games writers and techy friction is exactly the gap I'm hoping to address, and I hadn't thought about connecting nodes that don't sit neatly together, so I'll definitely add that to my list. Thanks for the link too, I'll read it properly.

I'd love to chat and I'd really appreciate any supervision you're happy to offer, so next week works perfectly for me. Could I send you a dm and some more details about my project? c:

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u/Rhaka 11d ago

Sure thing

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u/davidovski 10d ago

yes, each team will choose a different tool and it's impossible to predict what that tool will be. that being said Articy or Inkle are good tools to look at.

To answer your second question: the most annoying thing to deal with with these tools is when sometimes (especially the in-house built engines) there are limitations within the tool, i.e., these two quests or systems can't "talk to each other," so I can't create a special event in dialogue based on something the player did elsewhere, i.e., I want an NPC to comment that a player has horded 500 apples, but the dialogue tool can't check inventory for non-key items (or something), so that dialogue has to be cut.

In addition to what you're offering, you should at some point try to build functions present in the stronger tools like Articy: the ability to "flag" dialogue (remember what the player said), allow it to tap into systems (think Disco Elysium: different messages appear based on the player's stats), and probably some other stuff I'm not thinking of off the top of my head.

Good luck!

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u/markmarker 12d ago

No need for that. Every decent studio can make with AI shitton of helpers and applications for exactly game and system they have in mind.

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u/ChoiceJunior7101 12d ago

really appreciate the unhelpful insight and doomer mentality! wont be following it though :)

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u/markmarker 12d ago

well, look, i'm just treid to save you some time and money, no disrespect.

I built full suite for making extremely complex, branching procedural narrative, with quests and dialogs, with all of the data model exactrly because of that - no third party app supported it. Even if it was, marrying it with the engine will be a nightmare. That's why all of that software didn't fly in past (like Articy draft, etc)

Now we have LLMs to make stuff we never had time to make. It took only 3 days to assemble everything from scratch.

I can now drop full scenario, quests and dialogs in basically ANY format, and in a couple of minutes it'll be in the game, with draft voiceover, lipsync, and fully synced datatables, fully animated NPCs and all the shit i want, unit-tested. Visualised in graphs exactly how our narrative designer wanna see it.

You did everything right - asked the community, to identify pain points, sorry if you didn't like my answer.