Hey all,

I'm working on my second indie game after publishing a very dialogue-heavy Postmortem: one must die, and realizing my old approach won't work as well with a more complex narrative and many more variables affecting the conversations. So I wanted to share my musings and get some feedback:

Don't want to re-post the whole thing so here's a link to my devblog post about it. Let me know if you have any valuable thoughts from the writing trenchese :)

I would say, instead of branches, think modules and gauges. A module is one conversational exchange (or one action choice within the game), and the player can walk away from an NPC even if that NPC has another conversation module available at that time. Gauges mean, if you've got all these numbers for each NPC, show them to the player - like put an icon of a beer mug and put a number on it for how drunk the NPC is. Just the fact that beer mug icons exist will tell the player that getting an NPC drunker might be possible and useful.

Hmm, Interesting. I am already planning on adding different "entry points" into the convo that get triggered at different times (i.e. player initiated vs. npc confronting player after spotting him trespassing) which could kind of function as modules...