Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy

gamedeveloper.com:

Good game stories are built on the backs of good game storytelling tools. While students and independent developers can twiddle with the possibilities of Twine, larger studios need advanced (often proprietary) tools to translate written dialogue into in-game content.

At the 2022 Game Developers Conference, Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy senior narrative coordinator Rayna Anderson opened up the hood on her team's in-house tool called "Codex," with the goal of highlighting what pipeline problems Eidos-Montreal needed to solve to facilitate the game's banter-driven gameplay. 

Here's a few highlights on what features Codex boasts, in case your tools designer is looking to solve the same problems.

One of Guardians of the Galaxy's selling points is the charismatic cast of characters who are members of the titular Guardians (their paperwork says they're the Gardeners of the Galaxy but who's counting?). 

This doesn't just manifest in dialogue trees, during almost every moment of gameplay, the Guardians are bantering with each other, with the player character, with NPCs—it's a very talky game.

With that in mind, Anderson explained how the narrative team began thinking about tools for this pipeline early in the game's development. These are the top-level goals the team needed to create with Codex.

Codex has been Eidos-Montreal's dialogue tool for many projects now, so Anderson shared the specific improvements to the tool for Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy.

First, Eidos-Montreal created a unified filename structure that could be created for each new line. File names would follow a uniform structure, so that anyone looking at "C02_4140_OS_CNV_SEK_Tumble" could parse what they were looking at.

When writers entered lines into Codex, the