Hello! I'm aspiring to make an open world game with lots of quests. Think "The Witcher 3," but with really, really simple gameplay. Maybe that's not painting a good picture. What I mean is, you start the game and it feels like everyone you interact with is giving you a new quest, even people you have to talk to as part of completing another quest.
I want a tool that helps me visualize which quests are available at the start, how some quests unlock other quests, and even the ability to see choice within a single quest, so that I can see there are multiple ways to solve quest #8. It's also important that I can read what each node represents. I need to see that the "left" path of quest #8 is if you decide to kill Frank, and the right path is if you decide to bribe him, etc.
I'm very new to Quest Machine, but from what I could tell, it only lets you visualize one quest at a time. If it has some mode that lets you see everything at once, that'd be exactly what I need. If not, I'm looking for another tool that can help me organize what I plan to create in Quest Machine.
Visualizing all your quests at once
Re: Visualizing all your quests at once
That's correct; the Quest Editor shows one quest at a time.
I'm on the fence about recommending Nevigo's articy:draft. It's essentially a hierarchical graph tool. An articy project is a graph of nodes. There are various types of nodes, such as conversation nodes that can contain a sub-graph of dialogue entry nodes (individual lines of dialogue). It's a nice tool for organizing a project at a high level and writing dialogue, but it doesn't have a concept of quests, so defining quests is a bit awkward. Two other cons are that it's a bit pricey, and the Quest Machine integration relies on Nevigo's plugin for Unity. Their plugin is dog slow in the editor, although it runs fine in builds/playmode.
The Dialogue System's articy integration, on the other hand, can read articy's XML export format, so it doesn't rely on Nevigo's plugin.
You could use articy to organize quests "on paper" (and even write Dialogue System content there if you want), and then write their actual implementation using Quest Machine's Quest Editor. This would allow you to build a high level view of the entire project in articy.
If you're up for a little custom coding, there are also some open source network visualization tools such as Cytoscape and Gephi. One Dialogue System user wrote an enormous number of interconnected conversations in the Dialogue System for a complex PhD thesis. He used Cytoscape to visualize their connections, allowing him to zoom into a single conversation or zoom out to the entire project, One of the views looked like this:
Each block of colored nodes is a conversation, and you can see how interconnected they are.
I'm on the fence about recommending Nevigo's articy:draft. It's essentially a hierarchical graph tool. An articy project is a graph of nodes. There are various types of nodes, such as conversation nodes that can contain a sub-graph of dialogue entry nodes (individual lines of dialogue). It's a nice tool for organizing a project at a high level and writing dialogue, but it doesn't have a concept of quests, so defining quests is a bit awkward. Two other cons are that it's a bit pricey, and the Quest Machine integration relies on Nevigo's plugin for Unity. Their plugin is dog slow in the editor, although it runs fine in builds/playmode.
The Dialogue System's articy integration, on the other hand, can read articy's XML export format, so it doesn't rely on Nevigo's plugin.
You could use articy to organize quests "on paper" (and even write Dialogue System content there if you want), and then write their actual implementation using Quest Machine's Quest Editor. This would allow you to build a high level view of the entire project in articy.
If you're up for a little custom coding, there are also some open source network visualization tools such as Cytoscape and Gephi. One Dialogue System user wrote an enormous number of interconnected conversations in the Dialogue System for a complex PhD thesis. He used Cytoscape to visualize their connections, allowing him to zoom into a single conversation or zoom out to the entire project, One of the views looked like this:
Each block of colored nodes is a conversation, and you can see how interconnected they are.
Re: Visualizing all your quests at once
Cool, thanks for the ideas. I asked this same question on reddit, and someone recommended I use Twine. I'm very familiar with Twine, and although it's not meant to be used for this purpose, I think it could be a great tool for visualizing quests. Here's a zoomed out view of the IDE:
You can zoom in and I believe you can color code nodes, too. Twine is usually used to create text-based Choose Your Own Adventure games. It's also open source and there are lots of libraries out there that parse and generate its output. You can even create your own Twine programming language (Twine was built with this concept in mind), perhaps one specifically meant for easy integration with Quest Machine.
Anyway, given all the pros/cons you've presented above, and my existing familiarity with Twine, I'm considering using it instead.
Maybe some day twine integration would make sense for Quest Machine? I'd like to know what you think (if you have time to look into it), because maybe you'll see a good reason I should not use this tool for this job.
You can zoom in and I believe you can color code nodes, too. Twine is usually used to create text-based Choose Your Own Adventure games. It's also open source and there are lots of libraries out there that parse and generate its output. You can even create your own Twine programming language (Twine was built with this concept in mind), perhaps one specifically meant for easy integration with Quest Machine.
Anyway, given all the pros/cons you've presented above, and my existing familiarity with Twine, I'm considering using it instead.
Maybe some day twine integration would make sense for Quest Machine? I'd like to know what you think (if you have time to look into it), because maybe you'll see a good reason I should not use this tool for this job.
Last edited by AoF on Tue May 14, 2019 4:02 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Re: Visualizing all your quests at once
No, Twine is as good as any other -- and better than most because it's free. 
The Dialogue System used to have a Twine import addon back in the Twine 1 days when the twee format was fairly sensible to parse. I keep putting Twine 2 import on the back burner because it's so freeform that it's difficult to fit into a structured format like the Dialogue System and Quest Machine use. Even the Dialogue System's old Twine 1 importer by necessity imposed several restrictions on how things needed to be formatted. I may revisit it in the future for Quest Machine and/or the Dialogue System.
The Dialogue System used to have a Twine import addon back in the Twine 1 days when the twee format was fairly sensible to parse. I keep putting Twine 2 import on the back burner because it's so freeform that it's difficult to fit into a structured format like the Dialogue System and Quest Machine use. Even the Dialogue System's old Twine 1 importer by necessity imposed several restrictions on how things needed to be formatted. I may revisit it in the future for Quest Machine and/or the Dialogue System.
Re: Visualizing all your quests at once
Great! Thanks as always for being so responsive. I feel a lot more confident choosing it knowing that you think it's a viable choice.
Re: Visualizing all your quests at once
Glad to help!