SLIDGE

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
  • Tags for changing color and font
  • Tags for adding sound and timing
• 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
  • Easy to get data from the engine for use in your game
  • Easy to change data that the engine uses for text/choices
• 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