That is definitely an issue with this sort of thing; I think that you'd need to organize your conversations in a tree structure, and have 'save/load' methods fo

That is definitely an issue with this sort of thing; I think that you'd need to organize your conversations in a tree structure, and have 'save/load' methods for each node that could transcribe between a serialized data format like json or yaml, and functions in lua. With a format like that, you have the option of writing your dialogues in code or plain text, and easily switching between the two. The only major downside is that you can't easily define arbitrary behavior that way; every unique action that a dialogue event could trigger would need to be transcribed in your 'save/load' methods, which may feel limiting if you have a lot of hard-to-generalize logic.