Novelty guides and tutorials > Getting started > Writing dialogue
Introduction

In this tutorial you will learn how to enter dialogue and having it automatically presented in your visual novel.

Dialogue activities

A chunk of dialogue is called a dialogue activity. You can create dialogue activities in the Activities panel either by manually selecting Dialogue from the activities list, by clicking the Add dialogue button () or by pressing Alt+Enter.

Once a dialogue activity has been created and selected you can enter the name and phrase in the Properties panel. It looks like this:

When you're done writing, you can create additional dialogue activities by pressing Alt+Enter. Each chuck of dialogue will be presented to the player one by one in the same order as shown in the Activities panel. You can change the order by using the arrow buttons on the left.


Presenting the dialogue in a text box

Novelty will handle the details of presenting dialogue for you but this will only work if you first specify where and how. Simply put: which text object in the scene to supply with text?

So create a text box and place it in the scene where you want the dialogue to show. Next all you have to do is to right-click on the text box and navigate to the behaviours submenu and pick the corresponding dialogue behaviour.

There are different behaviours depending on which content you wish to present. Once the behaviour has been added to the text box you're done. Novelty will handle the rest.


Dynamic syntax

Dynamic syntax comes in handy if you wish to write out a variable that has been previously stored in the game's memory.

To dynamically show a variable you type [$Variable name]

So for instance, if we want the name of the person talking to be linked dynamically to a game variable, it would look something like this:


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