Dialoge system

Hi everyone,

I wanted to ask about dialogue systems in games.

I’m currently developing my own game, and as I started working on the dialogue system, I realized I don’t really know much about how they’re usually implemented or how developers typically approach them.

Some time ago, Epic released a free project called Animated Dialogue System, which actually fits quite well with what I want to create, since it’s the same type of game (top-down). When interacting with an NPC, a dialogue box appears with the character’s image, choices, and even resources for decision-making. It also includes an option for dialogue bubbles above the NPCs.

The thing is, this project creates a data table for each NPC, and I haven’t looked much deeper yet, but as the game progresses, I’d like those conversations to change dynamically. I’m not sure if this approach is the most suitable or scalable for that.

Basically, I’d need at least one data table per character and conversation, which makes me think there must be a cleaner and more scalable way to handle this.

If anyone knows how this is usually done or has some advice, I’d really appreciate the help.

Cheers and thanks!

There’s a plugin called Common Conversations, but it’s experimental and “there”. There’s a nice little graph to use for it.

I’m not sure what methods youve explored. For my game(a Diablo like top down) my dialog is text box based. I run it all from a data table. Though it’s all in one data table and each row represents a different character. Essentially npc that you can talk to have a dialog component, that has their table row assigned and constructs the dialog widget when interacted with. As far as dynamically changing dialogs one thing I’ve done is assign required quests to be able to access conversations. The quest is a value I assign in the table and is queried against the quest log on construct of the dialog UI. It’s hard to give super specific advice without knowing exactly what your trying to do or a specific issue but I hope this helps.