last May I finally played Disco Elysium and was blown away by their dialoge choices. I tried to figure out how they created these dialoges because it was obvious that they had to use a tool for managing this level of dialogue tree complexity... and so I found out that they used a commercial program called articy:draft for creating these complex dialogue choices.
I used their demo and realized that it had potential but of course it had no exporter to Ren'Py. Now, before buying the software I wanted to make sure that I could use it for RenPy and, as a proof of concept, I took a weekend and tried to make a simple articy:draft converter. While the XML export of articy proved to be difficult I finally got my first text dialogue exported thanks to their JSON export.
This converter takes an exported articy:draft 3 JSON file and converts it into Ren'Py rpy-files.
The focus of this converter is to create and export branching dialogues, therefore it is not a fully feature complete converter.
The script implements as much as needed for this task, but skips over other features for this reason (for example locations, assets, most of the non-dialogue specific entities etc.)
For better versioning I reworked parts of the converter and put it with the Readme part of this post on GitHub:
https://github.com/TheSchnappi/articy2renpy
Changelog:
- 2020-09-29: First Release - Now supports FlowFragments and end labels of FlowFragments and Dialogues are only appended in a seperate file, if they don't already exist.
- 2020-09-23: Code rework and as a new feature the converter now is able to convert and connect nested Dialogue flows. Also it logs onto the console... currently extensively...
- 2020-08-25: Initial Release
