Hello and welcome back! Muhammed here, once again, and I’ve got big updates for you guys on what happened in this past week or so. The team has made great strides in terms of the technical side of things.

We spent a good part of the week continuing our work on the dialogue system. Remember the bullet points I mentioned last week? Well, we were successful in creating node system, which is a solution for the first point. A node system is like a mindmap. You draw circles, or in this case nodes, containing the idea or action,  and you draw arrows to what that circle/node connects to the next. In this case, the idea or action was supposed to be a visual representation of the dialogue, choices and all. Problem is, just like a mindmap, it’s meant to only manipulate data, not putting that data into action. The main problem was saving the data from the node system to a format that was easy to manipulate. I decided that it was time to visit an expert regarding the aforementioned problem in mind: Digital Humanities Programmer, Joshua Romphf. After speaking with Josh, we agreed that I should try a few more methods at approaching the issue, such as saving the data to a plain text file or downloading an asset in Unity that would automatically parse– or convert the data to something Unity could us– but that I should also start looking for an asset for the sake of saving time.

My further attempts were in vain, and I decided to use the Dialogue System asset in the Unity Asset Store. Reading the features honestly seemed too good to be true. and, boy, was I happy to be proven wrong. The asset is the definition of dynamic. The dialogue editing system is simple; it automatically places the dialogue into developer-chosen UI, and contains pre-made frameworks to handle quest systems, characters, and locations. This is simplified my job exponentially. I’ve already created, with the help of the Writing Team, the first two scenes in the script. The problem now is, a lot of what is in the scene is placeholders.The Dialogue System put me way ahead of schedule, which gives me freedom to help the other teams out with their work. Check back next week for another update!

— Muhammed