Chatterbox Square

dialogueKit gives your game conversations: characters who talk, players who pick answers, and choices the game remembers. Install it once and every character in your world can talk.

Try it

You spawn in a little town square with one character for each way of presenting a conversation, laid out on a grid, each with a nameplate saying which presentation and style it shows. Walk up to anyone and press E (pad: X; phone: tap Talk). The story board lists the choices you've made. Leave and come back, and they're still there. Press 🌐 to switch the whole square between English and Brazilian Portuguese.

What one install gives you

• Conversations as data. Each conversation is one JSON file: lines with a speaker, choices, conditions (helped_baker && coins >= 2) and effects ("set": { "helped_baker": true }, "coins": "+2", XP). A new conversation is just a new file.
• Typewriter text. Tap or press confirm to finish a line, hold it to fast-forward. Reveals: letter, word, fade-in, and a shaky one for shouting.
• Talk to anyone. Put a Talker on any character, point it at a conversation, and players get a Talk prompt when they're close (from interactKit).
• 8 presentations × 7 styles, one field. Classic RPG box, speech bubbles, visual novel with portraits, cinematic subtitles, radial choice wheel, comic panels, retro pixel box and phone chat, in sci-fi, fantasy, cartoon, pixel, minimal, horror or cozy style. That makes 56 looks, and changing the field changes even a conversation that is already open.
• Choice layouts that work with any presentation: a list, a wheel you can drag to choose on, or a timed choice that picks a default when time runs out.
• Voices. Lines spoken aloud with the engine's voice generation (a pitch per character, with the music lowered underneath), cozy babble blips, or silent.
• Camera framing on the engine's own cutscene camera, optional per character.
• Every word translatable. All text comes from translation catalogs. English and Brazilian Portuguese are included.
• Keyboard, gamepad and touch, with answers sized for thumbs on a phone.
• Multiplayer from the start. Private conversations are seen only by the player having them. Shared ones, like Barnaby the town crier, show the same line and the same answers on every nearby player's screen, run by the game that owns the character. Story flags are per player and saved with saveKit.

The brain is the Narrative package. Sounds and music lowering come from soundstage, saves from saveKit, and the Talk prompt from interactKit. All of them come along with the one install.

Get started

Install dialogueKit.package from ZeroMind, then add dialogueKit.Talker to a character with conversation = "<id>". The package README has a copy-paste first example: a five-node conversation where one choice sets a flag and talking again takes a different branch. It also documents the data format, every presentation and style, multiplayer and saving, the API, and a 13-test suite.