Five-Minute Ultra-Quick Start

Follow these instructions to get the Dialogue System up and running in the minimum amount of time.

Step 1: Drag the prefab Assets/Dialogue System/Prefabs/Dialogue Manager into your scene. This prefab contains the Dialogue System's manager and a generic UI.

Step 2: Select the menu item Assets > Create > Dialogue System > Dialogue Database to create a new dialogue database.

Step 3: Inspect the Dialogue Manager in your scene. Assign the new dialogue database to its Initial Database field.

Step 4: Click the Dialogue System logo image at the top of the Dialogue Manager's inspector to open the Dialogue Editor.

Click the Conversations tab.
Click the "+" button to add a new conversation.
Right-click on the orange START node and select Create Child Node. In the Inspector view, set Dialogue Text to "Hello.". Note: Make sure you set the Dialogue Text field, not another field such as the Title field.
Right-click on the gray node ("Hello.") and select Create Child Node again. Set Dialogue Text field enter "Goodbye.". Gray nodes are spoken by NPCs; blue nodes are spoken by the player.
Close the editor window.

Step 5: Create dummy objects for the player and NPC. Select menu item GameObject > Create Empty. Rename the GameObject to "Player". Create another GameObject and rename it "NPC". (In your own project, you'll use your actual characters instead.)

Step 6: Select a GameObject in the scene, such as the Dialogue Manager. Then select menu item Components > Dialogue System > Trigger > Conversation Trigger. Inspect the Conversation Trigger component.

Set the Trigger dropdown to OnStart.
From the Conversation dropdown menu, select New Conversation 1.
Assign the Player GameObject to the Actor field.
Assign the NPC GameObject to the Conversant field.

Step 7: Play! When the scene starts, the Dialogue System will show the NPC line ("Hello.") followed shortly after by the player response menu, which contains one choice ("Goodbye."). It uses the Dialogue Manager prefab's generic UI, which you can later customize or replace with one of the many other UI prefabs included with the Dialogue System.

Where To Go Next

The instructions above introduced you to the Dialogue System's basic workflow:

Set up a Dialogue Manager and dialogue UI. (The Dialogue Manager prefab contains a generic UI.)
Write your content in a dialogue database.
Set up a trigger to start a conversation.

The Dialogue System is a comprehensive solution for AAA-quality conversations and quests. As such, it'll take you a little time to learn all of its features.

Here are some good starting points to learn more about specific topics:

Topic	Resources
Tutorial	The Quick Start Tutorial will give you a more in-depth introduction to tying conversations into gameplay.
Content	Read the Dialogue Database introduction or Dialogue Editor instructions for more info on writing conversations. This topic also covers Lua to remember game state and conditionally control the flow of conversations, Sequences to play voiceover, move the camera, and more, and Dialogue Database Converters to import data from third party applications.
Dialogue Manager	Read How to Set Up the Dialogue Manager to customize how the Dialogue System behaves.
User Interface	Read How to Set Up the Dialogue UI to customize the gameplay UIs.
Triggering Conversations	Read How to Set Up the Player (PC) and How to Set Up NPCs to add triggers to your game that start conversations.
Scripting	Read Scripting to learn how to work with the Dialogue System in your own scripts.

We're here to help! If you have a question, suggestion, or feature request, Contact Us or read How To Get Help.

<< Dialogue System for Unity | How To Install the Dialogue System >>