A gaming engine for the desperate
Developed since February of 2016, the Storming Leech Interactive Dialog Game Engine is a tool for creating dialog in games, in the style of a visual novel. It's designed to work with Game Maker Studio.
This engine provides an “editor” object and a “show” object. You simply drop the appropriate object into your game, and dialog takes care of itself.
Some features:
Wrapped typewriter text
Character portraits
Automatic interpolation animations
Characters have layers, like Ogres and Onions
Expressions and poses stored as layer sets
Choice boxes
Can link Scenes and/or set data
Can appear/disappear based on game data
Can set/increase/decrease game data
Visual styles for normal/hover appearance
Dynamic linking
Scenes and Choices can link to “variables”
Change Links by game choices
Change Links outside engine with your game
Fully visual editor to position characters, text, and choices
Multiple text boxes, characters, and choices on-screen at once
Support for Game Maker's camera system to position graphics
Overflow handling; text breaks into multiple boxes as needed
Made with localization in mind:
All text is in external files
All display text is labelled “text”: in the data files
Engine has a setting for swapping language files
Data generated by choices is stored in a map structure
Visual style editor: design textboxes and choice boxes within the editor
Visual character editor: set your character's layers and expressions on-screen
Modular design; each aspect of the engine operates pretty independently and granularly
100% GML - my code is as cross-platform capable as GameMaker allows
Basically, the idea is that you could make a complete visual novel without writing any GML code at all. Or, you can write your game to any level of detail you want, and then add on however much dialog you want.
As I've played with Game Maker over the years (since 2003), I've added visual editing tools to every casual game I've made, and I have had to solve and re-solve the problem of adding custom dialog too many times. I needed to put all of my most common needs into a single comprehensive engine. And that's SLIDGE.
For further ramblings, see why_game_maker_and_why_slidge