What Disco Elysium Taught Me About Dialogue Trees
Introduction Recently, I started playing the fantastic 2019 video game Disco Elysium, and I was blown away by the sheer amount of dialogue, choices, dice rolls, and consequences. It made me think, “How do you write a dialogue tree like that?” My immediate first thought was SCUMM, or the Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion, a game engine developed by then Lucasfilm Games for, you guessed it, Maniac Mansion (1987). I remember hearing about it a few years ago and how you could create locations, items, and dialogue sequences without writing code....