Branching storyline, software for decision tree?

[Deleted member 323963]

Hey, guys! I have started working on my own story for a game, and I am going to use RenPy as the engine, for now. I have looked into Unity, and I kind of wrote my own branching dialogue manager to keep track of story progress, but RenPy is much easier for now and for creating the prototype. The only issue I am having right now is that I don't know any good software where you can easily make a decision tree. It could help with visualizing the story and helping players with what choices they want to make if they want to have a particular ending. I am using Draw.io for now, but maybe the more experienced developers know better software purely for storywriting.

Thanks in advance!

 

[vir_cotto]

Freeplane and yEd Graph Editor are good and free choices.

 

[Deleted member 323963]

Thank you very much for you reply! I will check them out.

 

[polywog]

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[Jon_Sleeper]

Some people use Twine from what I have heard. You could check that out if you want.

 

[Deleted member 323963]

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Do you need a game design document, though? What I am making right now is a visual novel, where you press spacebar to proceed. I thought game design documents where used to describe gameplay. Though I agree you also describe how you progress throughout the game, but for me the sole reason to make a game design document was always to describe gameplay and how this changed throughout the game. But thank you for the references, I will take a look!

 

[Deleted member 323963]

Some people use Twine from what I have heard. You could check that out if you want.

I will check that out, thank you!

 

[Winterfire]

Game design is not essential but it is a big help and you will thank yourself for having it.

A game design is never the same: It could be a single page or 200 pages, it depends on the game and the meaning behind it.
Twine is a good one, +1

 

[Jon_Sleeper]

@Winterfire is absolutely right. I made a prototype side scroller for UE4 last year without any planning or design. It was a clusterfuck. And twine is really simple since it used html tags and IIRC there is an online version too where you can store your data on the cloud.

 

[Winterfire]

To be more accurate, in your case (a simple VN with no stats, I assume) a game design would be useful for world building... Characters and Environments for one.

The thing is that you should have a perfect full profile of a character, even if half of those things will never be told (not directly, at least) to the player, the more in depth you know a character, the more "alive" it will seem to the player.
You cannot have that without a game design, unless you have a perfect memory and it becomes basically essential if more than a person works on the same game.

Likewise the environments are important for the same reason, from small things like "I walk to the park and arrive there in 10 minutes" but in the scene before it was in the other side of the city to bigger and more important things like different angles when drawing backgrounds/CG.

-edit-
And dialogue too, in that case Twine does the job.

 

[polywog]

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[Ben Shapiro]

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[W65]

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God Bless America. I literally cried a bit.

Of course, science is global these days, so I guess it's really God Bless Open Source Nerds.

Of course, if NASA weren't a public body, those programs wouldn't be open in the first place, so God Bless the Public Sector, I guess.

Of course, even the public sector has its secrets (hello Export Controls!), and there probably isn't a god anyhow, so I'll just sit here and cry I guess.

Anyhow, don't you think that's overkill just a bit? Most porn game developers will probably never need software that's only ever been tested on equipment from Sun.

My suggestion is more of the Twine speed as the other folks are mentioning. It's pretty lightweight to get set up and has most of the storyboarding kind of features that you'd want--as far as I know, which isn't very. I dunno if its visualization tools are as good as you would want for tree-ing things out. That or yEd can probably do what you need it to do--and Twine can support images, so you could make the whole darn thing in it if you wanted to.

 

[polywog]

don't you think that's overkill just a bit? Most porn game developers will probably never need

A small game developer doesn't have to stay small forever. Wouldn't you like to play a first person live 3d adult game, where the NPCs have artificial intelligence, and personality that allows you to have a nonscripted random conversation? A sandbox where you can make NPC friends all over town, and those NPCs interract with one another as well?

 

[W65]

A small game developer doesn't have to stay small forever. Wouldn't you like to play a first person live 3d adult game, where the NPCs have artificial intelligence, and personality that allows you to have a nonscripted random conversation? A sandbox where you can make NPC friends all over town, and those NPCs interract with one another as well?

I can't help but feel that very few porn games will, in my lifetime at least, need to process as much data as your average astronomy research project. Also Sun's workstations were, like, thousands of dollars back when they still made them... but maybe that was just their Solaris crap. And GPU general processing is kinda going to push that kind of workstation out for most crap, which wasn't why Sun went under I don't think. I kinda forgot where I was going with that, honestly.

Anyhow, good on you for still being able to aim for the moon in this world of ours, but it's a pretty big leap from "small porn developer" to "developed interactive experiences indistinguishable from real life."

Also since they talk about man pages and Unix (not Linux) I'm guessing that it's command line, which is a little tougher to figure out than Twine probably would be.

 

[polywog]

I can't help but feel that very few porn games will, in my lifetime at least, need to process as much data as your average astronomy research project. Also Sun's workstations were, like, thousands of dollars back when they still made them... but maybe that was just their Solaris crap. And GPU general processing is kinda going to push that kind of workstation out for most crap, which wasn't why Sun went under I don't think. I kinda forgot where I was going with that, honestly.

Anyhow, good on you for still being able to aim for the moon in this world of ours, but it's a pretty big leap from "small porn developer" to "developed interactive experiences indistinguishable from real life."

Also since they talk about man pages and Unix (not Linux) I'm guessing that it's command line, which is a little tougher to figure out than Twine probably would be.

There is already one game here on F95 that utilizes artificial intelligence.

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Very dated but the core concept is there.

I was using 64bit processors in the 1970s, so my idea of computing is different from your average pc user.
Intel and microsoft kinda crippled the consumer computer industry. Home computers didn't get 64bit until the late 90s, meanwhile technology has advanced exponentially in the government and private sector, but the consumer market has stagnated. Developing software for windows, is like coloring with crayons... don't go outside the lines. Developing games that won't run on a pc, limits your customers. So all games made today are shit. I have to rip them apart and rewrite them to work on a 128 node visualization system. Just once i'd like to log in to F95 and find a 256bit game that requires 32Gb graphics.



"Former CEO Scott McNealy's allegiance to Sun's hardware culture shortchanged its software initiatives, and ultimately doomed the company.

Scott McNealy believes the best preparation for business is to play hockey. The teamwork, the individual risk taking, not to mention the bone-jarring collisions, are the closest analogy he knows to what is needed to function as the CEO of a technology company. In other words, he could never have taken Sun Microsystems in the direction it needed to go: Sun needed to become a software company.
Software is amorphous, invisible, full of promise that may or may not be fulfilled. Used car salesmen, with their goods at least visible to the naked eye, are paragons of virtue compared to software salesmen. How could Sun, a young and innovative hardware firm, make the switch to this tricky to manage, less tangible entity, a software company? In a word, it couldn't or at least it didn't, which doomed Sun."

Sun failed because they didn't stay in the box like they were told. They made the boxes to fit the applications, rather than making one size fits all applications.

 

[Winterfire]

AI better be slutty otherwise it ends up being no fun, still impressive tho

 

[HiEv]

I'll second... er... fourth the recommendation of using Twine to storyboard your plot.

If it helps, I collected

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.

 

[polywog]

AI better be slutty otherwise it ends up being no fun, still impressive tho

There are different customizable brain and personality files.

 

[SoulFoZoid]

This is getting silly......
For game developing use articy:draft it's a branching story line map making decision tree and texts flow chart software all in one it's the most advanced software you can use to preview everything.
The are other alternatives are storylinecreator an elegant way to make a story and see the flow
Causality by Holywood Camera Work

But with these fancy tools they help you so far you can use Google Docs to create everything they offer just by using the software that was not intended for it's purpose who said you cant use plain old PowerPoint to create branching story line dialogue.