Need help for tracking NPC, Dialogue and Quests table

[KZ007]

Hi guys,

I’m currently struggle with how to keep tracking NPC, Dialogue and Quests. I’ve come up with the following tables, and been planning to put into SQL. But still feels not good. Please can anyone give some suggestions on how you professionals do this kind of thing. Any links, materials or tutorials would be great as well. My planning is for having like 10-20 AI in each level (scene).
For Dialogue and Quest scriptable objects, I’ve put their ID in front of the name so I can easily know which is which. For NPC I put their ID at the end, Don’t know if this is a good way. Hope get some good suggestions. Thank you in advance.

[RustyNail]

No that i am a professional, just thought id share my thoughts on this;
I believe this is something very personal, what works for you might not work for someone else,
and the other way around.
I have a drawer in my desk, it might seem a mess to everyone else,
but i know exactly where everything is.

I personally dont work with sheets or tables in Unity projects, i put everything in ordered folders.
and extra info in the names, for example;

Scene_001/NPC_001/ npc prefab, quest, dialogue and possible reward item here
or if i want to use names i start with the number 001_“first level name”/001_“npc name”/

And if there are things i want to keep track of like EXP/Money,
i often just put this in the NPC name; _001_25-50_Jack,
then i know since i start with underscore he will be the top item in the folder,
i can see right away he gives 25 exp and 50 gold, and his name is jack,
if i then press the down key, for next folder, i can see npc 2 with all his items, stats etc.
That system works well for me, i never did a project with others tho,
so not sure how “clear” this system would be to other people,
they might prefer a sheet like you have.

Maybe other people can give you better tips on table/sheet usage!
gl with your game.

[Brian_Trotter]

As Rusty says, everybody has their own way of tracking things for quests… I’m a big fan of MindMaps, and there are a lot of free MindMap alternatives out there (though most of them only let you have one or two maps). I’m rather fond of MindMup:

This is a sample mindmap of a quest to learn the Fireball abitilty from Fizban the wizard (old time D&D novel readers should get the joke). It has no pre-requsites to get the quest, you just need to get some bat guano and return it to Fizban and you’ll learn the Ability. You could easily add Quest/NPC/Dialogue IDs to this map and see everything about a given quest in an interesting way.

[KZ007]

Thank you for your prompt reply and valuable experience. Yes, you probably right it’s relevant to personal preferences. I happened to be fond of tables and charts. I’ll borrow your ideas on the folder structure. It’s looks good. Thanks.

[KZ007]

Thank you, Brian. This idea is good. I like this approach. I’m going to have a look at MindMup.