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Le_Dieu_du_fond_du_Jardin/docs/designing_dialogs.md
kujiu (@ciredutemps) 8be7c8e7c1
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2020-05-07 17:33:05 +02:00

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Designing dialogs

The story is usually the cornerstone of an adventure game, and in visual media, stories are often told through interactions between characters. To make it easy to add dialog to your game, Escoria supports a flexible syntax for writing dialogs, backed by a heavily custimizible visual interface. This document is intended to help customize the appearence of such dialogs in your game. For a reference on scripting the dialogs, see the ESC reference.

Dialog players

To make your dialogs available from esc scripts, they must be added to one of the dialog players. When playing dialogs, the type parameter will be used to look up the correct dialog scene by name in the ResourcePreloader in either device/ui/dialog_player.tscn for the say command or device/ui/dd_player.tscn for the ? command. If no type parameter is provided or the given type does not exist in the player, the "default" dialog scene will be used.

If a type named "bottom" is registered, and the game's inventory is collapsible and open, this instance will be used with a fixed position to play the dialog.

Speech dialog

The default speech dialog scene is located in device/ui/dialog_default.tscn. If you wish to customize its appearance, make a copy like device/game/ui/dialog_default.tscn, and replace the "default" scene in device/ui/dialog_player.tscn with your own, using the bottom-pane file picker. Remember that the name in the ResourcePreloader refers to the type of dialog UI to use, and that "default" will be used if no type parameter is provided.

You may experience difficulties when trying to adjust the text node to your liking. Godot isn't very intuitive when it comes to customizing the RichTextLabel, but hopefully this will behave more like a simple Label in the future. In the meantime, Escoria relies heavily on the current type, as it should, to enable italic and bold font.

The project setting escoria/platform/dialog_force_centered will center your dialog text if your game is like SCUMM games, with the dialog above the characters. If you use avatars and big boxes for dialog, you will probably want to leave this disabled.

The dialog players are unlikely to change much upstream, so editing and adding multiple dialog scenes should rarely cause merge conficts. However, if you have multiple game directories within the framework, you are adviced to name your dialog resources sensibly and use the type parameter to choose which one to use with the say command.

For further reading, see the Floss Manuals section on speech text.

Branching dialog

To create unique looking dialog trees, custom made for your game, you can duplicate device/demo/ui/dd_default.tscn, and adjust these nodes to your liking:

  • dialog - This is the root of the branching dialog scene, and you should adjust the Anchor and Margin properties of it to make dialogs appear where you want within the viewport. As an example, to center position dialog horizontally, you will want to set the left+right anchors to 0.5 (center) and set the left+right margins to minus half the size of your dialog width. This will make sure the dialog is centered, no matter the screen width.
  • bg - This node can be used as a backdrop for dialog by loading an image into the Texture property. You may optionally want to set the Rect/Size, Expand and Visibility/Modulate properties to use a repeating, semi transparent background.
  • scroll - This node defines the area of the dialog scene that will be used to display text options. Use the Rect/Position and Rect/Size properties to set position and size.
  • avatars - This node defines the area where avatars will be displayed, if set with the optional type parameter. To use, add one or more Sprites as children of this node, and use the Rect/Position and Rect/Size properties to set position and size.
  • item - This node is the template for text options and is instanced into the dialog tree as needed. Use the Rect/Min Size/y property to define the vertical space used to display each line of dialog, and use the exported colors on the dialog node to set font color. Once set, you can use the escoria/platform/dialog_option_height project setting if you want to quickly change the height of all your dialog tree scenes.

You should not change the size or position of any of the other nodes, since that might make it difficult to make the dialogs appear the way you want.

Additionally, you can tweak the "show" and "hide" animations of the animation node however you want.

For further reading, see the Floss Manuals sections on the dialog interface and dialog trees.

Font

If you want to change the font of one of your dialogs, use the Custom Fonts section on your Label or RichTextLabel. To use a vector font, select the New DynamicFont option from the drop-down, then select Edit, and load your font file into the Font/Font Data property. If you want to re-use this font in multiple dialogs, you may want to save the font as a resource file (.tres file), and use the Theme property to load it into your Labels and RichTextLabels.