So while working through game concepts and deciding what to work on next, I've been refreshing my Godot skills. Wanting to get back into 3D and prepare for doing more narrative heavy games. Made this demo to learn nathanhoad's excellent Dialogue Manager addon and also test drive Kenney's new Godot platformer kit.
I'm really, really enjoying Dialogue Manager so far and feel it has a tonne of potential. Think it covers a lot of things I've been looking for:
Direct engine integration is super useful, as well as using custom resources to store dialogue. They're also text files so can still use external editor to update
Straightforward syntax, reminds me a lot of ink and yarn. As well it's named node approach feels familiar
Able to access global game variables for conditionals, and having conditional based loops and choices is very straightforward
Also able to call methods directly within dialogue, which is super powerful when combined with signals (showing/hiding coin UI mid conversation, playing sound effect)
Lots of options for random dialogue choices - just used the single line ones for now but in docs have seen they also have option for setting custom probabilities, just ncie to add more flavour
Hyped it has a built in approach for translations (create IDs and reference CSVs) that looks like integrates with Godot's localisation tools - a bit of a future thought but glad it has stuff to help built in
Docs you can mention you can create dialogue resources at runtime. Can imagine this being very useful - an example would be creating a record of all lines seen to replicate Ren-py's "log" feature.
The methods for displaying dialogue are super flexible. At the moment just used their example balloons but looks like it should play nicely to let you build custom GUI - and maybe even multiple forms (e.g. dialogue scenes vs flavour barks in main game world). Think next experiments will focus on this.
There's a few more things I'm keen to learn and see if they're feasible with this - "disabled" choices that still appear but can't be accessed would be nice, also looking at how you can integrate this with an audio system for voice acting - I think they have an example that includes voice acting?
Only thing I'm a bit nervous of is it looks like it can only grab variables from autoload/global scripts, so when putting into actual game will need to take care with save systems and methods for loading choice variables into a choice master global so we aren't keeping too much in memory at once. But if I'm wrong on this assumption, or others have approaches, more than happy to be corrected on this!
Also really enjoying Kenney's 3D platformer kit and it's been fun and . Making the shopkeeper bot was super simple. All the details on the original character model are modelled so just adjusted the face and for changing colours just had to move UV islands for limbs and face to different parts of the pallete textures.
Haven't tried this technique for modelling and texturing before but seen it crop up a few times so will definitely experiment with this in the future. Also might help with optimization - I think most of the materials in the pack refer to this single image texture? By default the pack only has the model glbs and a single colormap png so assuming that's how it's working.
Original plan was to fill in the shop with another pack so there's a few little platform challenges within this, but they all needed collisions adding so might add that in future. But main aim was focusing on the dialogue and think we've got a good approch going forward, and highly recommend the add on for other Godot devs making narrative games!
A powerful nonlinear dialogue system for Godot. Contribute to nathanhoad/godot_dialogue_manager development by creating an account on GitHub
