A Dialogue Pipeline

When I start at a studio, I almost always find myself building or rebuilding a pipeline for game dialogue. I wanted to write down here some things I’ve learned about that, my reasoning behind it, and where it bridges the gap between other pieces of gamedev. I hope there’s something here you’ll find useful. This is a bit of a brain dump and there’s a lot here. Forgive me if I’ve made too many assumptions! <h1>Let’s Talk</h1> So what do I mean by dialogue here? Characters talking. To each other, or to the player. In (many) games, this dialogue is presented to the user in two ways at the same time: <ul> <li>As text, on your screen. For example, as subtitles, each line of text normally attributed to a particular character.</li> <li>As audio, played through your speakers. These lines are normally linked to a “source” object in your gameplay space, such as a 3D character.</li> </ul> Some games only have text. And that’s fine. There are probably some things that I’m going to say which are still useful to you. Some games only have audio, and frankly if you can’t provide subtitles you should know better. :-) So what I’m going to discuss here is this combination — text and audio, both representing the same spoken line of dialogue. <a href="https://wildwinter.medium.com/a-dialogue-pipeline-db0be8d8509c">Read More</a>