Hello,

Im searching for the best work flow for doing a text adventure game with a lot of branching dialogue. I like Quest because it can keep track of rooms and objects which seem to be a good fit for a text adventure which is focused on giving lots of player agency. But it will be focused on dialogue and not interacting with a lot of objects.

Three candidates ive found so far:
Inklewriter - Very linear, novel like, used in banner saga
Twine - Very visual - but uncertain how complex a game it can support. No keeping track of rooms.
Quest - Rooms, but difficult dialogue creation?
Chat mapper - Awesome, but you need to export format to some game engine. Costs a pretty penny.
Inform7 - used to make Blue Lacuna, interesting english language programming language. Altogether different but hopefully works as well as the rest for publishing to different platforms?

Might it be possible to find some great tool for writing dialogue and then important it to Quest, such as Chat Mapper? Or am I going about it all wrong?

How do you go about creating dialogue in your games?

Thank you for your help!
Chow

I'll preface this by saying: Don't bother with Inform7. Even hardcore Inform users tend to prefer the older versions. Inform7's syntax is as esoteric as any programming language, but there are fewer resources available to help you understand it. This means that Inform7 is actually several times harder to learn than a language like BASIC. The documentation is self-congratulatory and isn't very helpful either.

Quest has been the easiest for me to use, but I haven't tried the others - I will definitely look into them.

The workflow should be divided into two sections: Writing and programming.

Dialogue is written using flowcharts. You number the flowchart and write the dialogue in a word processor. I use yEd Graph Editor for just about everything - mapping my game out, puzzle dependency charts, everything. Carrion Fire has no dialogue trees, but I'd use it for that too.

Once you do this, it comes down to which software is easiest to program in. I've searched - for a long time - and nothing has beaten Quest.

Game books like Twine are quite different to Quest and Inform. I would describe them as time-orientated, rather than space-orientated, so they lend themselves to the flow chart approached, but do not handle navigating rooms too well.

There are various ways to implement conversations in Quest. I just updated a library to handle dynamic conversations that would probably do what you want:
viewtopic.php?f=18&t=5510

Honestly, out of all of the text adventure software I tried out I find Quest to be the easiest and most powerful of them all

Thank you so much for your help everyone.

yEd is fucking amazing. I spent a couple of days looking for good graph programs. Settled on Scapple, but this is even better.

Wiz. It's the best tool in my kit.

in addition to Pixie's help~work, you can also take a look at Jay's (jaynebonne's) work too:

Spondre Game by Jay:

viewtopic.php?f=5&t=4883 (the game itself)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULjIjSQ ... e=youtu.be (a vid of someone playing spondre)

and Jay's well-appreciated source code made publically available for us:

viewtopic.php?f=18&t=4889

also, there's some help~links~guides with~on dialogue~conversation in these boards~links~pages too:

viewforum.php?f=18
viewforum.php?f=20
http://docs.textadventures.co.uk/quest/guides/

I'll second yEd (check this out, http://koobazaur.com/gamedev/game-desig ... ersations/)

http://www.simoncrowe.net/software/98-d ... aph-system looks interesting too.

Thank you so much everyone for your help! Amazing.

A question, what is Wiz?

That postmortem was excellent to read.

Chow wrote:Thank you so much everyone for your help! Amazing.

A question, what is Wiz?

That postmortem was excellent to read.

It's Shadowrun-speak. Wiz basically means "cool." It's short for "wizard."

HaganeSteel wrote:It's Shadowrun-speak. Wiz basically means "cool." It's short for "wizard."

For reference:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xViZ38xRQr0