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Note: Meandering post as much to get my thoughts in order as to share.
Been bopping along on my roguelite (Basically the core idea is Hades gameplay meets Path of Exile/DotA style build diversity. You start with 1 character unlocked and the rest as NPCs and unlock more as you progress). Currently working on getting a dialogue system setup, and deciding how much player choice I want to provide. I'm kinda in an awkward spot because the whole point of a story heavy rogue-lite is that you keep playing the same save. You experience the story over the course of a lot of runs, and playing more runs, rather than starting a new save, is where the replayability value comes from. Which is great, and the original intent, but it does mean that it's very unlikely players will ever see the results of a second dialogue choice.
I'm considering ways to get around this, because I really like the idea of fleshing out character relationships and giving people choices for how to roleplay the characters. But it would mean really altering the design of the game and doing something like giving you a permadeath failure condition, or letting you start the game as multiple characters, instead of making them all unlockable over time on one save. But permadeath defeats the purpose of a progression focused roguelite (You'd lose all those unlocked weapons and trinkets!), and playing clean runs as different characters doesn't actually solve the multiple choice dialogue only getting seen once issue, since I'd get to write a fuck-ton of dialogue from everyone's perspective and you still probably only have 1 save per character.
I'm probably gonna add dialogue choice options for normal conversations anyway, but they'll end up being mostly for flavor and largely useless. Maybe a couple for 'makes unlocking character easier/harder depending on if you read their personality right' or 'choose between rewards/different character's favor'. I need dialogue choice as a concept anyway for hub and spoke style 'ask character about things' interactions, and I'm big on choice and customization in general.
Anyway, after I write the integration for that (Using Inkle's Ink and it's simple unity api. Everything else was too big and writing my own fancy GUI looked unfun, so I'm just gonna build features off Ink tags), I'll be working on simplifying my code for melee attacks. They're a slightly awkward feature because I built them within my framework for 'abilities'. That works well for things like attacks where you charge and hold, and one off attacks, but it's kinda weird for attacks that have mechanics like a 3 hit combo (Because mana cost and cast time is configured at the ability level, but I might want different costs or delays per attack in the combo). Also the way I handle animations currently isn't very flexible, so I need to figure out exactly how I'm handling animators and animation clip swapping between enemies/players.
Anyway, once I get all that done I'll be swapping over to art mode for a bit to flesh out the first biome and it's first miniboss. And add some clothes, so I can take screenshots and not have nude humanoid models everywhere.
Depending on the mechanic of restarts and progression, couldn't you just allow the player to revisit conversation branches or ask follow up questions to hear the conversations they previously missed? I'm thinking of a morrowind-like system of conversation where once an NPC had mentioned something you unlocked it as a dialogue option to ask about later.
If the conversations have more permanent consequences, I wouldn't worry too much about branches being missed or made unreachable. Any kind of progression also has areas of content that you miss out on once you make a permanent choice, and lore/conversations are no different. People who want all the lore will have to replay just like people who want to try out different builds or classes.
I could. Rerunning the direct conversation would feel bad but I could probably do something where I store some conversation outcomes as tags in a dictionary and write further branches in different conversations that check that state. But doing those is lowkey a QA nightmare, since it's a lot of string match checks. I suppose I could write a validator, but even then it'd be real hard to verify that the latter conversation always comes after the former.
Starting to see there are reasons why Hades and it's sequel don't give the player dialogue choices. It's a LOT of state management for a feature that isn't going to be as core to gameplay like it is in say BG3.
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