I was the lead designer and implementor of a dialogue and story management engine for Unreal. I originally built this as a contractor for The Molasses Flood, a Boston-area game studio. The studio was later acquired by CD Projekt Red and I was brought back on to develop the engine further for a game in the Witcher universe.
TMFS was a screenplay-like scripting language, somewhat like Ink, but with facilities for describing scenes, characters, and locations as well as dialogue. The intent was to procedurally generate quests and story arcs by assembling scenes according to story rules. I was responsible for both the compiler (source code to Unreal assets) and the gameplay implementation of those assets (directing NPC interactions according to the script).
The game was rescoped several times in early 2023, and a large part of the team was laid off, including me. I believe the game is still in development and TMFS is still part of it, but I don't know how it has changed since I left.
(No links, I'm afraid; TMFS is a proprietary technology for a game in development.)
I was one of two engineers building a next-generation dialogue system for videogame characters. The project was conceived by Emily Short for a company called SpiritAI. The intent was to combine flexible, topic-based dialogue mechanics with AI lexical analysis of the player's input. (2017-era AI, not current generative AI.)
Character Engine was originally written in C#. I was involved in porting it to C++ as a plugin for both Unity and Unreal.
We worked on Character Engine intensely for a couple of years, but sadly the project did not gel with how the company wanted to run it, and nothing ever shipped.