Dialogue Strings & Quizzes
Last updated
Last updated
Copyright © 2012- 2023 The Sandbox. All Rights Reserved.
See Dialogue in our Narrative Design resources for information about creating engaging dialogue that fits within the technical limits, and communicating plans with a team.
Open Game Maker and find logic tutorials in the Templates tab for hands-on learning.
The following logic can be used to add text to your Experience to guide players:
Speaker component
Asker behaviour
Rules system game screen options
Banners
Popup window
Text variables
Objectives (quest UI)
Indicator component (short text labels and quest icons)
Text formatting can be applied to almost any text in the game.
A dialogue string is a series of logic events used to:
display a conversation between an NPC and a player (with answer options)
display quiz questions (with answer options)
display a "read only" conversation between NPCs (using Speaker component)
An object may only have one Asker behaviour and one Speaker component. This means that multiple objects are needed to create a dialogue string. That usually includes objects with visibility turned off.
Asker behavior may be triggered in a linear sequence or may trigger different paths of gameplay.
Add a Speaker component to an object, set to detect players, and add text to appear in the box. This may sometimes be used instead of setting up a quest Giver icon.
Speaker components can be set up in a string since they require a message to trigger and can send a message when triggered. There is no built-in delay, so you may want to use a Timed Events behaviour to receive the outgoing messages and trigger the next Speaker using precise timing so the player has time to read each Speaker's text.
Add an Asker behaviour to an object, set a question or statement, set player responses, and set messages to be sent if the player selects each response
Add a Toggle Behaviour component to an object (SP or MP depending on other logic applied to the object) to set messages to turn the object's behaviour on or off or set a message to switch between on and off states. Set the initial state.
This allows you to turn on or off any Asker behaviour dialogue to trigger only the right dialogue needed for the quest state or for a string of dialogue.
Every quest has three states depending on the player's actions: before, during, and after. See our Quests page to learn more about how quests work and how are set up for a more natural game flow.
