Welcome to East Breach

At the Eastmost point of Lanmar sits a cliff, a last bastion of society between the mountains and the infinite desert, with an ancient palace carved into the side. Today, the site is a tourist attraction, border checkpoint, point of religious significance, and terminal between inland money and shady business in the lawless desert. Far horizons, crumbling ruins and dense tunnel networks all in a tight area are a perfect fit for an adventure.

East breach is an RPG setting I've been working on that's a good fit for multiplayer interactive fiction. In this demo, you can grab your friend to play as 2 characters, or give one character to a bot which randomly makes a choice every 3 seconds. The goal of the demo is to explore some of the funky situations that multiplayer dialogue can get you into.

The specific genre of dialogue is in the same family as Disco Elysium. Each playable character has 6 skills representing aspects of their inner self, which chip in regularly during conversation. I opted not to do dice rolls eventually because I wouldn't have time to implement them to the same degree of quality as they appear in DE (with different color choices depending on the skill, a UI that shows the outcome of each dice, etc.) Instead, the dialogue is fully scripted. In exchange, your decisions really do matter, with some 500 nodes split across 3 distinct "areas" of the conversation to explore, all from 2 different perspectives.

This is actually my first time writing dialogue trees at scale (I'm mostly a programmer, so I was just obsessed with getting the multiplayer architecture working smoothly), so as far as the content is concerned I focused on basics like using variables to make simple minigames. There's many points where you can haggle, argue, and pressure to your hearts content, sometimes against yourself! You can press F1 to inspect the game state and see how your decisions are affecting things.

Finally, this game comes with a custom dialogue tree editor for my custom dialogue tree engine. That's super work-in-progress, but I'll at least have a working documentation of the existing features up soon. My long term goal is to make a general graph editor for games, like Tiled but for graphs instead of grids, since I've always liked visual programming languages, shader node and animation node systems, etc.

Features

2 player peer to peer online coop with support for LAN or port forwarding with UPNP.

Custom conversation editing and loading. All displayed text has support for bbcodes via Godot's native RichTextLabel rendering. Current custom conversation editing does not have integrated support for custom images and styles.

Configurable keybinds.

Interactive scrolling conversation navigable with the mouse or with the number keys to select choices.

Future Goals

If this demo is received well, my plan is to remake it with more staple mechanics of the genre, including:

 - 3d overworld with point and click movement

 - dice rolls, experience points, and leveling up

 - thought cabinet (least likely to complete, since it would be the hardest to manage with multiple players)

 - inventory and money

In addition, the multiplayer and modability will be more fleshed out

 - 4 playable characters, including the 2 shown here, each with distinct user interfaces, camera perspectives, and narrative styles. 

 - Temporary dedicated server for early players.

 - Multiple possible behaviors for bot-controlled players.

 - Prettier and more optimized custom dialogue editor with undo/redo and other standard features 

Bug reports and Donations

This is my first itch game where I'm enabling donations! This project represents of months of work, some lost hair, and a lot of personal ideals for me. Even a tiny amount is enough to let me know that you are interested in the project. Reviews and bug reports are also welcome in the comments.

If you do send a request for technical help, it helps a ton to attach a screenshot with the debug (F1) menu open displaying your game state, and information on whether you are the client or host. 

Known Issues

Invalid choices are supposed to be hidden by the engine, but I know about a few cases where this doesn't work properly. The result is a choice that looks like it does nothing when you click it. That just means the choice is unavailable. 

The UI sometimes "misaligns" vertically. Idk what causes this. Sometimes you can fix it by manually scrolling down to get to the bottom of your dialogue history.

Sometimes strange interactions on the multiplayer side of the game can cause the same dialogue item to appear twice on one player's screen. Once when you arrive, and a second time when the other player arrives. I've spent more time trying to fix this than I'd like to admit, and it's nonfatal, so it's staying.

Credits

QA testing: Jeffery Lin (https://x.com/888scholar)

Freesound assets:

Wood Block Hit by thomasjaunism 

Toy Blocks by didi0508 

Wood Block by jimbo555

Clop Chop by datasoundsample

Temple Block Lunarlander 1969 by sadiquecat

Block on Counter by 2embersart

Sword Draw Sheathe by gulfstreamav