I built a game around dialogue trees

I joined a silly game jam a few weeks ago with no ideas and a lot of tired frustration, and ended up building a whole game around one single mechanic: dialogue trees! 💬 This is the story of how starting from a tiny mechanic (instead of a clever concept) saved my jam, and how everything else (the town, the silly characters, the goals, even the endings) slowly emerged from that one decision. In this video, I talk about: - The rough Friday where I almost gave up - Why I threw out the "clever ideas" and followed my curiosity instead - How I built the dialogue system in Godot (node walker, flags, memory) - Designing the town and a cast of silly characters - How I used AI to help write dialogue trees without losing the soul - My art style I've been refining - Making sound effects with my mouth and a tiny Ableton loop - The key lessons I'm taking into my next projects Join the brand new community Discord! 🙌 https://discord.gg/XCHeB6WfXx Videos mentioned: Making art for my game as a programmer: https://youtu.be/Ime--1cLdJw The first 11 weeks of building my cozy game: https://youtu.be/mNYVXQIEkv8 Jerbob's Silly Game Jam: https://itch.io/jam/jerbobs-silly-game-jam @Jerbob 0:00 Intro 0:37 Rough start 1:23 Turning point 2:09 Core system design 3:29 How the dialogue system works 5:57 Content creation 7:50 Town showcase 10:38 How goals emerged 11:17 Art pipeline 12:26 Sounds and music 13:14 Key lessons 13:56 What happens next 14:38 Outro