When we created STASIS, CAYNE and BEAUTIFUL DESOLATION we relied on third party tools to create the conversation trees in these games. Unity does have several solutions for a node based editor but these all require the Unity editor to actually work on the files. This poses a problem for Chris as he doesnt use Unity, it also excludes translators from viewing the conversations in a conversation graph format.

I initially used JSON which is a commonly exported format from most graphing tools. I personally find JSON to be very messy and painfully difficult to use when any complexity is applied. My chosen format is always CSV. Comma Separated Value files can be opened by many tools, including Excel and Google docs. CSV files are easy to understand and read and we have found that most translators also prefer it.

I also wanted a tool that could merge all the csv files that represent each conversation into a single file that would be easier for a translator to work with.

Keeping this all in mind I could not find a third party solution for this and I was tasked with making this tool on our own.