Making narrative systems for Síofra Sí

Síofra Sí is the first bigger narrative game I worked on and I wanted to break down the tools and some of the techniques on how I approached this. The tool of choice for the dialog system was Dialogic, which makes organizing text and ui a lot simpler.

For the game specifically those systems had to be build on top:

• a timed choice system - so you only get a limited time to answer questions
• a day cycle for multiple characters

For the timed choice system the approach was to have a separate UI and handle communicating with it via the dialogic function calls. And thank godot for signals, they solved all mayor issues one could face when communicating accross different interfaces in a game system. The dialogic interface would then look something like this:

The day-cycle implementation uses a custom Resources that stores on what day each character can say what dialog. This resource then gets shared and can be accessed by another handler that decides what dialog to play at any given interaction. This resource could then be edited in the inspector like this: