LogIn"Why do games take so long to make?"
This isn't just a dialogue tree, it's an entire forest. Atom Team, the indie studio behind ATOM RPG, currently developing Swordhaven, a fantasy cRPG inspired by genre classics, has offered a glimpse into the complex dialogue with just a single NPC in the game.
Atom Team shared this in response to an image posted by Senior Animator Robert Morrison, likely a third-person control setup, an absolute tangle of nodes. The point Robert was making is that a lot of developers struggle with organizing their node graphs properly, and that's why things end up like this.
Other devs joined in, sharing their own Blueprints in various conditions:
Visual-based programming can easily lead to these kinds of wild complexities. While an NPC dialogue tree can become quite extensive, though it might not be practical, there are definitely smarter ways to organize your code. Logic code, like a player controller, shouldn't be this long at all.
Optimizing your nodes early on (or looking into other programming approaches) is just as important as keeping your Asset Browser tidy, it'll make your workflow a lot smoother in the long run. For better project organization, you might want to try the Actor I/O plug-in for Unreal Engine 5, which offers an input/output system similar to the logic used in Valve's Source Engine. Another handy one is Flat Nodes, which gives your graphs a minimalist style, making them much easier to read.
We've got tons of useful game development tools over on 80 Level: for example, Property History lets you quickly view the change history of properties, while Level Optimise Tool helps you identify potential bugs and optimization issues in your Unreal Engine 5 levels.
By the way, you can check out any dialogue in Atom Team's modkit, it's open to everyone:
Atom Team
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