I just love this game. I spent a really really long time on it, the most probably out of the games in this jam. I just got absorbed into the story, the characters and the world! The writing is superb and thrilling. I found myself mapping out details on paper like names, locations and chronologies. I just wanted to ask as someone who also made a text based game using dialogic for the jam, how did you organise yourself, what tactics or tools did you use to storyboard? And what dialogic habits can you recommend for timeline management? Anyway very well done, so glad I found this!
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Thank you so much! I'm really glad you liked it!
For storyboarding I just used loose-leaf paper and had them laid out on my desk so I could see everything at once. For writing the dialogue, I used ellipsus, which is a google-doc alternative, and just copy pasted it into Dialogic.
As for writing the story, I came up with the initial concept, then the gimmick with the evidence, and then the body twists and worked everything backwards. I then figured out what I wanted the player to interact with the game, ie the box, the computer and the phone, and I made what I called an 'evidence-chain' where I determined what piece of evidence lead to what else.
When it comes to using Dialogic, I would recommend learning how to access features from the code, such as flipping variables and pausing for menus. The best example in this game is when you talk to someone the first time I have a variable that gets flipped, so if you call and talk to them a second time, an {if} statement gets triggered that sends a signal to one of the gd scripts turn on the end call button.
When it comes to timelines, personally I prefer to have a lot of little timelines. The phone, for example, jumps to another timeline when you input the correct string, using the string variable. That way if I need to edit something I don't run the risk of messing up too many things.
If you have a button or a trigger that opens up a dialogic TL, if you press it you can set it to open up even if the TL isn't null, in which it will automatically jump to that TL. I used this with the End Call button which just opens up a new TL that has a single line of dialogue then closes dialogic.
I hope that answers some of your questions!
Thank you for the elaborate reply! Yes some of the things you said about dialogic I was already practicing, but the thing you said about closing dialogic is interesting. We were struggling to find ways to bypass dialogics domination, in the sense that it hogs all inputs. Our programmer had a script for buttons to manually take the mouse order rather than the base godot code because dialogic wouldn't let the click go through. Disabling dialogic at key moments could be a good idea for us as well! Your game inspired me truly, it was really some time since I was this absorbed. The music and sounds also added to that atmosphere. Good job! If you want you could check out our game as well, your feedback about the story , the writing and feedback in general, would mean a lot to me! :)) Havea good day.
So what Dialogic does is it creates an 'input catcher' as a part of the scene, that means that you can't click anything. You can turn off the input catcher layer entirely through Dialogic by making a new Style, or you can shrink the input catcher by editing the scene. But if you need something on top of Dialogic, then you can always put it in a canvas layer and have that above Dialgoic which is at default layer 3.
Thanks! I'll check out your game when I have time!