For my current solo project that I am working on I have been setting up systems that are going to be helpful for creating the game experience I want to achieve. This custom dialog system is an example.

The dialog system is something I attempted to create before with Cat Detective. In that attempt I discovered an issue with how to store dialog, so I wanted to focus on solving that issue here.

I wanted to use excel for the dialog because excel is really easy to format and edit. Learning how to load data from a website and then creating a local backup in order to account for edge cases like internet access was all a part of using excel. The dialog system is currently in use in my team’s capstone project, Fairway! The ability to use excel with the functionality for loading the dialog inside the unity editor has made it much easier for devs working on narrative to change and see the results.