Anyone using dialogue trees in their apps (or games)?

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I’m currently working on a video about dialogue trees. That’s the kind of thing where you have a pre-scripted dialogue that flows according to your choices and some context. It’s often used in games but I’m pretty sure it could be very useful in apps, too (especially for onboarding).

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(Just to be clear, this has nothing to do with AI chatbots. These are human-defined, scripted interactions.)

I wonder if anyone has interactive dialogues like that in their app. I’d be interested to learn your experience. I’d also be interested to learn whether you’ve ever though to have interactive dialogue in your apps/games but for some reason decided not to implement it.

My first commercial game was about ½ dialogue trees (in Ink, for which I implemented a custom engine). Now I’m looking at dialogue trees for my upcoming game. For that purpose, I made a tiny demo of pkg:jenny (which is a Dart implementation of the popular Yarn Spinner dialogue system).

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Will be a interesting use case for guiding a customer to choose the correct product.

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FWIW, here’s my little tech talk about dialogue trees that landed a while ago on YouTube and I forgot to put it here:

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I used to, but not for games. It was the first hype on chatbots, when they were not so smart. I only had available the intent the user had (using Microsoft’s LUIS or Facebook’s Wit) and then I would try to make a chat asking questions, etc. It was the same of, let’s say, an RPG dialog system, but the input was a user free text interpreted by a very dumb AI that took all user’s text and returned me: user is saying about payments. I even did a full UI dialogs for Facebook Messenger, but my employee didn’t like it (first because WhatsApp is the majority here, and at the time it didn’t support UI at all and he wanted something “smart” >.<).

And it was a pain… especially when using the Microsoft chatbot framework (it’s was not about AI, it was literally an attempt to create a flow of conversation - and the user text didn’t even matter, because it was parsed as an intention anyway, so it was just like an text click handler).

I wish I used some XNA/MonoGame/Unity plugin to do that >.<