smcamerons-python-adventure VS YarnSpinner

I don't know if this counts, but I wrote a parser for "the ship's computer" in my game, "Space Nerds in Space". It's described here: https://scaryreasoner.wordpress.com/2016/05/14/speech-recogn...

I also wrote some toy "interactive fiction" things (with less sophisticated parsers) in python and Lua as a way to gain familiarity with those languages, not that they are very interesting in and of themselves, though they demonstrate a fairly standard technique behind these kinds of games in a compact way.

https://github.com/smcameron/smcamerons-python-adventure

https://github.com/smcameron/space-nerds-in-space/blob/maste...

Here's a trivial text adventure in python I made when I was starting to learn python: https://github.com/smcameron/smcamerons-python-adventure

The point though is to start with a very simple, well known, text only type of game, like interactive fiction or a "text adventure", or whatever they call Zork like games nowadays, which in its simplest incarnation is (or at least can be) pretty simple (i.e, mine is about 400 lines of Lua), but can be made arbitrarily more complex by adding new types of objects, object interactions, verbs, and sentence syntax that it can understand. It will give you a good feel for how to organize a Lua program, how to deal with data structures ("tables" in Lua), etc. It's simple enough, and being text only, you don't get caught up in details of the problem that don't actually have much to do with the language itself, but complex enough that you have to think a bit. I find it a good problem for new languages (I did the same thing when learning python.)

Another option if you don't want to implement it yourself though is to use an already built library. I've been playing with YarnSpinner a little bit recently and I'm liking it so far. I can't give much more details than that, but it's maybe worth a look. At least for some reference.

I looked into other solutions, but haven't tested them yet: (Ink)[https://www.inklestudios.com/ink/] (Yarn)[https://yarnspinner.dev/]

I am currently working on a 3d Unity game that uses a classic visual novel interface for conversations with NPCs. I am using Yarnspinner for the VN parts. It's a very powerful and flexible middleware that allows you to write your dialogue trees in a very simple domain-specific language.

I recommend looking into Yarn

After writing several own dialogue solutions, I decided to use Yarnspinner as a dialogue scripting solution for my latest project. It's really powerful, flexible and easy to use. I see no reason why I would ever want to invent my own again. It comes with a sample dialogue UI, but the website has a guide for how to create your own.

Please have a look at Yarn or Twine :)

Find ways to tell those stories without complex mechanics. Visual novels and text adventures are a great example. If you have a budget, hire a good artist and maybe look into voice over actors. If you're short on budget, look into AI to generate images and even to do voice over. As for tools you have Twine, Ink and YarnSpinner, to name s few and, in terms of game engine, don't lose too much time picking one. Whether is Unity, Unreal, GameMaker, Phaser, Pygame or just HTML with vanilla JS, go with whatever makes you feel comfortable and requires the lowest amount of effort for you to start doing something.

Yarn spinner

It’s a package for Unity. It handles all the dialogue stuff for you, and gives you software to write dialogue too. You can check it out on their website https://yarnspinner.dev