Day 5 – Dialogue systems

Since I do want to add some actual content into the game soon I spent the day playing around with a dialogue system. My demands are pretty simple: The dialogue should be read from external asset files. These files should have a simple syntax. I need simple dialogue choices and some options to update the available dialogue if things happen.

Inkle's dialogue markup language Ink seems pretty much perfect. Unfortunately it has no Rust implementation or easy integration. So I decided to take a shot at writing a simple implementation of it. Nothing very fancy since I doubt I can replicate it's advanced functionality, but if I can get the basics going I'll be perfectly happy. Diverting between knots, presenting multiple choices, basic conditionality and insertion of variables is included here.

Work is ongoing in this branch (permalink to today's status here) where I've used created a separate workspace (`base`) for the game engine and another for the dialogue system (`inkling`).