r/gamedev•
ObamaIsPutin

A Method To Comfortably Input Story Data

Question

Hello! I am currently working on a project with large amounts of dialogue that is both branching and conditional (e.g. some options only appear when conditions are met), and I am a deciding on how to input conditional data. The approximate model of my dialogue blurb is:

var speaking_order : Dictionary[int, String] ### Order of characters speaking

var texts : Dictionary[int, String] ### What each character says

var choice_text : Dictionary[int, String] ### Text of each response option

var choice_results : Dictionary[int, event_bit] ### to which dialogue bit response leads

var bool_triggers_changed : Dictionary[int, Array[String]] ### What bool variable each response option changes

var bool_triggers_changed_to : Dictionary[int, Array[bool]] ### To what state the bools from bool_triggers_changed are changed to

As you can see, it has a bunch of variables that need to be put in there, and there will be more. People who are going to put the data in are going to be somewhat tech illiterate, so the input method have to be relatively simplistic. So far I can think of three options:

  1. A Notebook/Word template: essentially just make a template in plain text that story people will have to copy+paste, text will be converted into code by a script. I imagine it is going to be prone to errors, + not very comfortable to work with variables.

  2. An Excel template: make my story people place data into excel cells, good for variables but placing text into excel cells is a pain in the ass.

  3. I write my own little plugin specifically for putting the text and the variables. Will take time, and I have a shit ton to do.

Any suggestions, people?

Posted Sep 13, 2025, 10:58 PM UTC

03
Loading comments…