I built a game around dialogue trees
I joined a silly game jam a few weeks ago with no ideas and a lot of tired frustration, and ended up building a whole game around one single mechanic: dialogue trees! 💬
This is the story of how starting from a tiny mechanic (instead of a clever concept) saved my jam, and how everything else (the town, the silly characters, the goals, even the endings) slowly emerged from that one decision.
In this video, I talk about:
The rough Friday where I almost gave up
Why I threw out the "clever ideas" and followed my curiosity instead
How I built the dialogue system in Godot (node walker, flags, memory)
Designing the town and a cast of silly characters
How I used AI to help write dialogue trees without losing the soul
My art style I've been refining
Making sound effects with my mouth and a tiny Ableton loop
The key lessons I'm taking into my next projects
Join the brand new community Discord! 🙌
/ discord
Videos mentioned:
Making art for my game as a programmer: • Making art for my game as a programmer
The first 11 weeks of building my cozy game: • The first 11 weeks of building my cozy game
Jerbob's Silly Game Jam:
https://itch.io/jam/jerbobs-silly-gam...
@Jerbob
0:00 Intro
0:37 Rough start
1:23 Turning point
2:09 Core system design
3:29 How the dialogue system works
5:57 Content creation
7:50 Town showcase
10:38 How goals emerged
11:17 Art pipeline
12:26 Sounds and music
13:14 Key lessons
13:56 What happens next
14:38 Outro