The Dia(b)logue

In a game so heavily reliant on dialogue and writing it was important to have that system up and running before pretty much anything else got started. Sticking to my “why do the work if someone else has already done it” philosophy I came across the Dialogue Plugin by CodeSpartan on the Unreal Marketplace, it looked to do a lot of the things I was planning on so I bought it and began to tinker.

The dialogue tree for the main prologue conversation, as this is quite a linear interaction it flows clearly from top to bottom without too much branching.

This, as it turns out, was perfect for my game. A logical workflow that allows you to define a conversation visually as well as add in events and conditionals, perfect for the “RPG Lite” mechanics I had planned. Within a couple of days of tinkering and wildly amusing errors I had the basis for what would become the dialogue engine that currently underpins the game. The philosophy of no fail state and a constant sense of momentum for the player allows me (and hopefully you) to have a lot fun with the conversations, there is no wrong way to play the game, there is no right path for the character to take. The initial dialogue is linear by both design and necessity, but others branch out in far more interesting ways.

Let’s look a little closer shall we? We shall!

Close up of a section of the dialogue tree where name variables are being set.

You’ll notice those catchy little lightning bolt symbols in the player responses (blue boxes), each of which is sending an event, in this case setting different variables to create the player character’s name which are then called in the NPC reply (black box) down the very bottom, and for the rest of the game, as %charname%. Simple and effective.

The same very basic system can of course be layered and used in far more complex and interesting ways. For example running invisible “skill checks” on whether or not a certain dialogue will show up. If you happen to have a particular item in your inventory at the time you might have additional options in the tree, perhaps even an entire new branch you wouldn't otherwise see. Depending on how you’ve been playing your specific trait score may or may not be high enough to get information out of a character or to deal with a situation in a certain way.

Wait… trait score?

Traits! Think of them as character classes in a traditional RPG, they quietly exist in The Fleeting Tide and will be the topic of a future blog post.