Dialogue Designer Reviews

useful little program but: 1.Most important - Need auto save after any changes. (like some screenwriting programs and mobile apps - its very intuitive, fast and effective in modern world) If not AT LEAST ask about saving edited document before exit. lost some time on this one - intuitively closing document assuming it will ask to save or saving already like most programs i use. 2. wish it will have some ui improvements possibility to control everything from keyboard fast (e.g. shortcut for creating specific node, auto choose last type, choose character with arrows or other keys (like vim) hit enter, auto jump into text window after ctrl+enter jump to choosing variants or ctrl+enter and jump to creating new node with choosing type with shortcut or with arrows- theres not so many of them hit enter, shortcuts for fast navigation between nodes) create and choose nodes after dragging connection with mouse 3. use actual zoom scroll 4. less important for me but looking into possibility to edit theme and workflow environment like placement of elements and their size and colors.

I highly recommend this software, especially for those who do not want the creative process to be stymied by a lot of coding or having to learn a new programming language. There are a TON of great features, and I'm sure the developers will continue to add to this impressive offering. In the future, and to echo what was said by another reviewer, it would be REALLY nice if it could export dialogues to the rpy script format for the Ren'Py engine (visual novel engine).

Advantages - Convenient and functional dialog editor. - Nice interface design. Easy and not loading system. - The editor can be used both for creating dialogs and for creating branched blocks of stories (for any type of game). - I was pleasantly surprised when I learned from the file structure that this editor was made on the Godot Engine (this is cool). Disadvantages - I haven’t noticed the cons yet, time will tell.

Even after all this time it's barebones. No usable zoom. Cannot edit character names. I do not recommend it.

Lost hours of work, at the bottom of screen it was confirming it was saving....boy was I WRONG. Truly sad to see. C'est la vie. Not going to use faulty product.

This program is not suitable for use in a production environment. The program has multiple bugs that have not been fixed. The output JSON is often malformed. Node duplication causes contents not to be saved. The program lacks basic functionality like specifying an output directory for exports. Additional tools are needed to make it usable. It appears to be a hastily assembled tool slapped together using existing free Godot UI libraries. I was unable to reach the developer after multiple attempts to reach out.

Great, simple dialog designer. Love it for what it is. However, I haven't a clue what to do with it in Unity, and the developer doesn't bother to explain. This is the typical case with a lot of Unity assets: the dev spends months or years making a great asset and then about ten minutes showing how to use them or not at all. You politely ask them how to use them and they reply paraphrased it's your stupid fault for not having a degree in C#! Well, that may be the case but not if you're selling a purportedly simple to use, codeless product. Referring a customer to the Unity help page for JSON importing is a cop-out, in my opinion. So, why not make a video showing how to implement this asset in Unity, or at least outline how to implement it. I don't know about you, but I'm sick and tired of wasting many, many hours tying to figure out how to use an asset. What use is Dialog Designer without being able to implement it in Unity? Not much at all; I suppose you could use it to map out dialog, but there's plenty of free ( to a point) dialog mappers, Whimsical and Lucid Chart etc, which do the same thing. If you can't code and want to use Dialog Designer in Unity, don't buy. Be warned.

Short Version: If you're using Unity, I do not recommend this too. Use YardSpinner, free, openSource and integrates properly with Unity. https://yarnspinner.dev/docs/unity/installing/ If you're using Godot, then probably, as that's what it was built for. If you'r using something else, you need to build your own JSON parser, so I do not recommend. Use other better tools that you'd have to do that for anyway. I did use this for my last gamejam, in unity, but after using it, I realize it needs more work. It's easy to lose your data, no warning when closing. It's also unclear how "execute" works and there zero examples out there of how the variables should be set or used. Example, the boolean variable, how should it be checked? I am using https://github.com/BrianMacIntosh/DialogueDesignerUnity to get it working in unity. It would be nice too, see access all your conversations quickly and connect them to each other. You can't export to another file. if you Export it overwrites your json and then if you try and open that exported file it won't open and your screwed. Yeah you can change the name real quick, but if you forget.. you're sol. Doc doesn't say what the diff char types are. Doesn't say why I click the chat icon it changes from round to square icons. No idea what "slide camera" means. Unless this just all random things to code for manually. What's the syntax for checking conditions to choices.. etc. So yes, it works with the integration Brian MacIntosh created, but not sure how in-depth you can use it's features. I'm still doing trial/error to figure it out. Can you use string values in conversation? if so how? is it brackets? Does it work? sure with the integration from someone else. So Depends how you want to use it. If it's Unity I'd recommend don't use it and use yard spinner. If it's for Godot, I guess, haven't tried it with that game engine.

I really like this, it has some issues and some important additions I think will be easy enough to add. In the following video we look at implementing it and the Godot Dialogue System https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqECpmfahZo Fantastic software, extremely user friendly and ideal for your creatives / writers and authors to start knocking out scripts for the coding team. The author should be extremely proud of what they have created! The only downside is that I'm not a big fan of the JSON output, writing a new parser for it will not be simple, there is a Godot Parser available. I've yet to try and pick it out and put it into my own framework. It is perhaps designed to be too user friendly at the expense of flexibility. What would be fantastic would be for the editor to allow for custom fields or tags, similar to characters / variables etc. Custom fields could be associated with the various nodes and have a specific query system in the parser. In my case I want to add custom elements like associated filenames for audio with particular nodes. I'm sure there will be more I need to add as well. Finally, not all of us need cameras, so it would nice to make the camera follow checkbox optional (even better, make it a custom field). Other than the above, I highly, highly recommend it and I invite the author to join me on live stream to talk about the project in more detail if he/she would like. We will certainly be looking to put it through it's paces in the next few episodes. What an exciting find!

Looks okay on the surface but I had to refund straight away because there are only 2 zoom levels (which you toggle with a button). For that reason I can see this would be useless for navigating medium to large trees. Mouse wheel should be used for zooming.