u/triple-cerberus

Six members of an adventuring party return from their quest only to discover the magical artifact they sent to retrieve is mysteriously missing. All of them have reasons they might have stolen it, and your conclusions can make or break which of them takes the fall for it... and whether the wrong person walks free.

Edicts of the Truthsinger: The Orb of Artemagus is a love letter to games that made us really feel like brilliant detectives piecing together a convoluted mystery. It's up to you to do the work of connecting the dots and discovering the contradictions before you unlock new questions you can ask each suspect. Follow leads, make note of keywords, and collect map pins and codex entries as extra clues to guide your investigation!

My friend and I have spent the last couple of months working on a mystery / social deduction narrative game that we hoped would combine our skills and passions into a really polished game. We haven't cracked a hundred wishlists yet, but the demo launches next week and we've got until the end of October before the full game's launch to try to build some more awareness!

I'm a couple weeks away from being able to launch the demo for Edicts of the Truthsinger: The Orb of Artemagus and I continue to be really happy that I decided to stick with my engine of choice for making it. I did a writeup about my experience with Dialogic 2 a little while ago and I really do feel like it gave me the perfect balance of flexibility, familiarity, and out of the box functionality.

I very, very briefly thought about trying something like renpy that's really made for visual novel building but I know Godot pretty well at this point and knew I'd have an easier time doing things you don't typically see in a VN with this game if I were working with the engine I knew best. If you're thinking about starting a visual novel project with Godot as your engine I really recommend it!

TLDR: Dialogic 2 is great if you're a beginner and you don't need much customization, or if you're very comfortable with GDscript and want specific functionality that doesn't come out of the box, but it isn't as good for the use case of a newer coder who has really specific needs for their dialog system that don't match what Dialogic 2 is made to do out of the box.

Some background: I've been using Godot since 2019, have two commercially published indie games, and just started work on a new one this year.

The game that I'm working on is a social deduction detective game inspired by games like Her Story and The Roottrees Are Dead - I envisioned a game where you talk to a small pool of NPCs and are trying to catch them in lies by comparing their testimonies to those of the other characters. I wanted the lines of dialog and the implications of those lines to be the "clues" you were working with, unlike some detective games that really focus on physical evidence, so I knew I was going to need a really robust dialog management system. At first, I assumed I would have to build something entirely from scratch, because I had a few things I wanted to do that I didn't think the existing plug-ins could manage, but after a bit more research I decided to install Dialogic 2 and see just what it was capable of.

I'm honestly really glad I did. Out of the box, it could handle all the basics of what somebody would expect out of a dialog system - input interception to continue to the next line, pleasing little clickyclacks when each letter appears, the character images being able to swap between faces and body expressions. As is, it's a great system if you're a moderately experienced Godot user who doesn't want to reinvent the wheel when it comes to dialog.

When it came to some more complicated things I wanted to be able to do, the Dialogic 2 Documentation was a pretty good resource for understanding what parts I had to open up and fiddle with to get what I wanted out of it or do something a little weirder. For example, I wanted to be able to dynamically present the player with questions to ask each character based on which lines of inquiry the player had unlocked. I didn't want set, linear conversations - I needed a way to make the questions you asked and the answers they gave dependent on variables in a way that wouldn't be scalable if I had just used the built in "variables" options within Dialogic 2. (Have you hear the horror stories of the Undertale if statements? Haha.)

The solution was to write some code that checked my database of lines of dialog to see which questions were available to the player to ask, make a list of eligible ones, and then translate each question and its associated response into the text format syntax that the documentation lays out. It was honestly easier to do than I expected. (Happy to share my code with anybody looking to do something similar!)

This allowed me to add new questions in the middle of a conversation (a "timeline", in the terminology of Dialogic 2) dynamically if the player were to open their notebook and drag and drog an idea out of there from a record of another conversation. Because I've got lots of practice figuring out how to do something in Godot by reading the documentation, I was able to figure out how to customize a code-based dialog timeline generation within the context of Dialogic. That made it more than feasible to create a system where you could generate new questions for the characters on the fly by referencing notes you had taken in other conversations.

Easy breezy, right? Well, not... entirely effortless. I spent a full day trying to figure out how to create a slider for players to customize the playback speed of the dialog text, which seems like a pretty basic functionality, and found the official documentation refers to no less than four different ways of doing this, none of which worked. The solution I needed was buried in a github bug report, and involved digging up a very specific function and telling it to stop resetting the dialog playback speed every time you start a new line, please and thank you.

It also took a surprising amount of work to figure out how to do things like align the questions on the right side of the screen instead of them appearing in the middle, and give the character names a white outline (because it turned out applying the character name colour to the name text was being done via a modulate, not via changing the text colour)!

So, all that said, would I go back and write a custom system for dialog instead of using Dialogic 2? No, absolutely not. Even the most annoying and baffling scavenger hunts I had to go on to make it behave a certain way I wanted it to took less time that it would have taken me to make a whole system from scratch. Using this plugin has been a massive time saver, and honestly, a huge stress relief. Given how essential it was to the premise of the game I'm working on, having something prebuilt that needed a bunch of tweaking was preferable to making everything from scratch.

I absolutely recommend Dialogic 2 if you've got a game that needs a robust and expansive dialog system. It has a visual editor if you're a less experienced coder, and some pretty good basic menu-accessed settings to get things a bit more customized without any coding needed. It'll be an even better tool for you if you have the experience and the confidence to open up the code and go digging around in its guts changing things to suit your needs like I did. I was even able to customize their layered portrait module so that the characters can move around and change expressions and have the head snap to the new location of the neck from pose to pose, instead of having to keep the location of the bodies perfectly stationary so they'd stay aligned with the heads. (Again, if you're trying to do something similar, let me know and I'm happy to share how I did it in more detail!)

Dialogic 2 gets a 9 out of 10 from me! The documentation is very good and useful but has a couple inconsistencies, and the built-in functionality is pretty intuitive. It's easy to use and fairly easy to customize with a bit of GDscript know-how.