Characters & Dialogue

A story can have a cast: characters you define once and then put into any scene as a conversation. Each line shows who is speaking — their name in their colour and their portrait, with the face that fits the line.

Creating characters

Open the Characters tab in the editor’s inspector and click Create character. For each one you set:

• Name — shown on the name plate above their lines. It can hold a variable, so a player character can be called {{name}} and wear whatever name the reader typed.
• Colour — the name plate, the outline of their lines, and their accent in the editor.
• Emotions — one portrait per mood: neutral, angry, delighted, whatever your story needs. The first one is the default, used whenever a line doesn’t pick a mood. PNG with a transparent background looks best — the portrait stands in front of the scene.

Characters belong to the story, not to a single block. Rename someone or redraw a portrait and every line they speak picks it up the next time you save.

The player character

Tick This is the player on one character and they become the reader’s own voice:

• Their lines stand on the right of the scene; everyone else stands on the left.
• The choices at the end of a dialogue are presented as their replies, under a “Name replies” label in their colour.

Only one character can be the player. Ticking it on someone else moves it.

The Dialogue block

Add a Dialogue block from the Scene group on the toolbar. In the inspector:

• Background — the image the conversation happens in front of.
• Lines — click Add line, pick who speaks, pick their emotion if they have more than one, and write what they say. New lines alternate speakers by default, because that’s what a conversation is. Reorder with the arrows.

Then give the block choices or a link onward, exactly like a Text block. On the canvas, the block shows its first few lines with each speaker’s name in colour.

What players see

The scene fills the stage with the background, the speaker’s portrait slides in when someone new starts talking, and one line sits in a box along the bottom. A click, Space, Enter or → moves to the next line. After the last line, the choices appear — and not before, so nobody skips a conversation by accident.

Checks before publishing

The pre-publish check flags a Dialogue block with no lines, and any line spoken by a character you’ve since deleted. Variables used in lines count as read, the same as in text.