Difficult systems (Patreon)

Hey sorry for taking so long at the moment. It's been a rough couple weeks and the way I'm trying to improve this writing tool is just much harder than I hoped.

The key problem with getting and retaining writers is how complex the systems are and how much work it takes to do simple things. If the game was a visual novel it would be much more direct as the whole game would basically be one large dialogue tree. You could just add dialogue paths ext. 

An open world game relies of hundreds of small tree's linking together in complex patterns and with individual interactions. I just can't seem to crack a way to make this easier for writers so they don't find things so overwhelming. 

Honestly it's not their fault. It makes sense and typically writers aren't high on the tech end of the skill set so I need to create solid tools that are simple and direct.

I've been trying to get the new template tool working in game and it's proving to be very very difficult. Making a single dialogue pop up is easy. But anything more complex requires a dialogue tree. Which is the base component of all in game dialogue.

The issue is a dialogue tree is not dynamic. So i can't easily string two pieces of dialogue together. When you talk to a character and you see a couple options for replies. Those reply's are pre-baked into the dialogue. But I need to string multiple of these dialogues together. That means like you've got one dialogue piece and then a reply option that could link to new pieces of dialogue.

But the system I wrote I wrote about 2 years ago and it so isn't designed to work that way. I've spent like 5 days just trying to generate a stable tree but it's just not working.

So the easiest solution is I need a new dialogue user interface. I'm going to duplicate the existing one and link it to a new text system. It will look and behave exactly the same as the current one so the player won't notice. If I do this I can just stop trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. I can also make any change without breaking anything else in the game dialogue.

If I can get that to work I can pull a dialogue from the template and then grab another dialogue from the same template and link them in real time as the player is reading / interacting. I don't need to convert these dialogue pieces into a completely different be baked format. J

This has been such a headache. Honestly this is still worth while because I'm trying to set up the project to be easier to support in the long run. This way I can keep adding content and add new people much more easily. But obviously in the short term it's an insane nightmare.

Anyway, sorry for the brain dump but this has proven to be a really tricky problem. With any luck I'll get over this roadblock so I can start integrating and testing a template.