small tip for your portraits! whenever their mouth opens up, try lowering their jaw as well, it will make their animation look a lot more like they're actually talking.

Fun fact: the branching tree and skipping methods are mathematically equivalent, there's even some formulas for ensuring no collisions when skipping

One thing that's crystal clear to me is that the art in your game looks really good!

The portraits look really cool!
I was trying to articulate why I found them a bit uncanny (especially the white hair girl) and I have a clue: the esclera is full white. I see a lot of people shade them for a more natural look.

I had a thought when watching that preview: you could pause the talking animation whenever a pause (for example, "..." and "!!!" as single text boxes) comes up in dialogue. In that vein, custom sprites for special cutscenes are also something that'd help push the polish up I think.

I made a dialog system a while back in Godot with also branching paths, but since I wanted a lot of dialogs, branches depending on previous choices or game state, I went with a database and wrote a whole node based dialog editor in the end to have a better overview and make changing dialogs easier. On reason is, lists get complicated after a while and inserting a line and finding all the other points that connect to it are difficult.
I also added some logic to only make choices availabe (hidden or greyed out) depending on conditions. Conditions include all things in the game, including inventory items etc. Each dialog line can also have a reward that saves the previous state, so rolling back dialog is always possible while adding inventory items, changing game state etc in a non-destructive manner.
Finally rewards could also call random functions to play animations or do anything in the game.
Maybe some of these ideas can be useful.

Phoenix wright vibes. love it.

Very cool!
The only thing I don't like is the words skipping into the next line(while being typed) when there's no longer enough space

Damn you got me on the vine booms 😂😂

Loving that background music. Talula's updated design also looks great.

Hey I love your system, I love you explaination even more, and bc all that I deceided I need to play your game. You are someone I look up to now

Works for prototyping but will explode on any larger dialogue based game - but nice video by itself :)

Dude, wow! Your art is amazing! Do you have a dedicated artist? Do you do all of the pixel art?

Overall, looking great! Cool to see your system. Couple of minor nitpicks: The shadow around Talula’s mouth makes her look like the Joker sometimes; I’d either bring the value of that shadow up closer to the main skin tone, or make those areas smaller. Also the text wraps as it appears, rather than the text box already ‘knowing’ what line the word will appear on; and that makes it look a little jenky. But overall great work. I might also put some additional animation into the eyes themselves, including blinks occasionally, as when the mouth is the only thing moving it can look a bit robotic.

I would use Ink or Yarn-spinner plugin. Both well supported and documented, and you can test the script outside the game-engine. All that makes it easier to collaborate with team-members that only want to focus on the script.

Master Game designer Apox Fox back at it again

If it wasn't for the visuals you could make this entire game in a little over a weekend with the same control over functionality in HyperPad. It's pretty crazy.

Informative, thnx for making these.

Good job on dialog system. Only complaint I have for character expression you should change the eyes too. I'm used to Ace attorney, dangaronpa type games and they really expressive sprites!

out of topic but if i dyed my hair blue, I'd look quite uncannily like Junebug. Hair, face, and mole accounted for