Something I’ve been thinking about and working on is a node-based dialogue system.

I’ve just begun writing my own isometric, story-driven RPG, and found that managing and writing dialogue to be a bigger challenge than anticipated.

There’s plenty of solutions out there for Godot, but writing my own just sounded plain fun.

After some tinkering with Godot and a lot of misses with inspectors and exported variables deeply nested, I discovered GraphEdit. The docs do say that it is experimental, but it seems to contain a lot of the things I want.

With GraphEdit in mind, I mocked up a design of what I wanted, and found it fairly straightforward. Sketch

I’m not overly concerned with managing game state flags within the system - the controller code can handle that. Each ‘dialogue instance’ will receive it’s own DialogueManager object that handles loaded the resources generated by the tool, and the inputs/outputs will allow management of game state. This part is tricky and not something I’ve fully fleshed out yet.

Anyway, after some tinkering, I came up with a basic UI. It still needs ‘choice’ containers within the node, but I found it absolutely wonderful that I could get a mocked-up front-end done in an afternoon in about 300 lines of code.

Draft