I'm a small way into writing a piece of software to manage my game plot and dialog. I'm wondering if software like that already exists, because I really don't WANT to write software like that, I want to create a game... but I just don't know how other people are doing it. Is there any good software that does this? How, for example, would a company like Bioware track the dialog trees for the whole game? They must have a tool (and I'm sure in bioware's case it's homebrewed). Any ideas?

Tracking the dialog tree? Sounds interesting. Could you elaborate on what that is, what it means?

It's interesting that you mention Bioware because NWN for instance had great support for writing hierarchical dialog with various conditions, transitions and scriptable effects at every node, all from within the Aurora toolset. Seeing some of their other games after that makes me think that they pretty much reused the same tool. Unfortunately I don't know other tools like this, but you could make use of a generic XML editor to help you keep it organized if you don't feel like writing a tool for it.

Tom:
Essentially, the dialog interactions in the game are represented by a graph (or multiple graphs really, one per NPC). Every node corresponds to some text, either what the NPC says or what the player says. NPC nodes typically can have more than one player node child which allows for dialogue choice. Nodes can be displayed conditionally (if relationToPlayer > NEUTRAL, if questABCProgresStage == 100) or can perform actions or scripts (playSounds(), dance(), giveMoneyToPlayer()). It's also possible to cycle back to previous nodes.

This topic is recurrent but I couldn't find the old threads.

The old answer was:

o The tree/graph when it is drawn, is an annotated flowchart
o The software is a flowchart software
o But usually, the plots and conversations are modular
o You do not need to represent the entire tree/graph
o On a flowchart, only the top level plot points are shown
o Design the plot and conversations into modules

Someone probably has a new answer.

I'm not too sure what you mean by tracking the game plot, but here's something for dialogue trees: http://www.chat-mapper.com/

The developer visited the Help Wanted forum a little while back looking for some feedback/testers.

[Edited by - ProggleRock on November 16, 2009 6:44:42 PM]

Yes, I think our software (Chat Mapper) is exactly what you are talking about. From interviews that we have conducted, many times developers use Excel but I'm sure there must be some in-house software as well. We are gearing up for the official release and we are in the planning stages of our follow-up software called Story Mapper. The goal there is to map out plot lines as well as conversations. The ultimate goal is to fully design the story in such a way that you can essentially export to a game design document.

For tracking the plot tree, SLang might be helpful. However, I can't even remember how long it's been since it's been updated or anything. I keep thinking about writing my own clone of it, but...