First release & the origins of Squeaker!

Squeaker had a long road to v0.1's release.

I made this program with our upcoming game Onward Rodent in mind & it's origins go as far back as when the game was decided to have branching dialogue when it entered the alpha stage of development. I knew typing this data into raw dictionaries or spreadsheets would be inconvenient in the long run. However, I still ended up doing this for the past two years before Squeaker finished development.

So what kept Squeaker from being usable before now?
Squeaker actually had a predecessor dialogue editor named Meep that I worked on for a few months before realizing it had some fundamentally flawed ways of storing data.

I included a couple pictures showing what it looked like. The Demo-tan portraits weren't done by the time I retired Meep which is why it shows a big question mark as the portrait instead. Another interesting thing to note is that there is no save/load options. This is because when Meep starts it first opens the default project and saves it when I close Meep. Just one of those things that show I really only made the application with myself in mind in this version. However with Squeaker I kept in mind making it a lot more end-user friendly in case I would release it publicly. Turns out I ultimately would, so good move.

The problem with Meep's storing of dialogue data was every entry is tied to a character & place. What I hoped would help keep it organized turned out to do much the opposite. I made all the entries be kept under a dictionary of character names which were also stacked on top of dictionaries with place names. Turns out this was a really dumb idea. It actually made it harder to keep the data organized and required both a character and place to call any dialogue. I found the data would be much better off decoupled from either. Squeaker by contrast only needs a key name for each entry that in turn refers to the data instead of tucking it under a dictionary. So after a hiatus where I settled for putting my dialogue directly into spreadsheets during the game's development, I eventually felt ready to give this another go from scratch. Squeaker is the result of that & many other ideas I had for an improved editor.

I am really glad that Squeaker came out so well. The new things I've learned about Godot's UI system before Squeaker's development really helped, but more than that, learning from the mistakes I made with Meep helped me understand in many ways how *not* to make a dialogue editor.