The Click to Speak Editor, TextEditor3, provides an array features and options that you can use to build your own Click to Speak stories and adventures! This guide is here to help you get familiarized with the basic features of the editor, so you can jump right in and start building.

Getting Started

Starting a New Game

The first thing you'll see when you open the editor is this dialog box:

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Let's assign names for our characters. I'm going to use the names from our sample game, which you are free to open in the editor to explore its features on your own:

Editor Basics

After you choose your character names, you will be presented with the editor interface. Don't worry about the tabs and menus at the top just yet, first we're going to explore the basic operation of the "Main Script" tab, which will contain all the dialogue paths for your game.

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By typing more asterisks and adding more dialogue, you can create a complex tree of dialogue based on what NPC dialogue the player chooses to respond to:

Other Information about Nodes

• Typing text in a new PC node will create a new NPC node as its child.
  
  
• Typing an asterisk into an NPC node will create a new child PC node beneath it, based on where you type the asterisk.
  
  
• Pasting in multiple asterisks will create multiple new PC nodes.
  
  
• If you type an asterisk between two existing asterisks, the new child node will be inserted in between the two corresponding nodes.
  
  
• If you delete an asterisk or select and delete multiple asterisks, the nodes will be removed and sent to the Orphan Tab. (more on this later)
  
  
• Asterisks can be dragged around the text box to change their position.
  
  
• You can manually set PC nodes as the child of another PC node, or an NPC node as the child of another NPC node, if this works for the game you are building.
  
  
• You can give nodes "nicknames", set in the "ID" text field, to make them easier to find, especially when you have built a large game.

Try building your own dialogue tree with three or four levels of dialogue depth! With a lot of dialogue visible, it can get messy to have all of it visible at once: Sometimes you want to work with just the children of one node, without all the children's children and so forth in between! You can click the minimize/expand button (labeled ">" for minimized or "V" for expanded) to make a node's children visible or invisible, so you can look at only the nodes you want to work with.

Audio

Adding Audio

Now you have some dialogue, but to be able to listen to and interact with the game, you need to include some audio. Let's start with the first PC node. Click the button labeled "Audio". This will open up the basic audio editing interface, which looks pretty blank for now. So, let's load up some audio! Click the "Browse" button on your first node, and navigate your computer for the recording of the sound you want to use, or just find a random audio file for now, to test this. You can also use the sounds from our sample game... Once you've loaded the file, your node should look like this:

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Pretty simple! You can click the "Play" button to preview the sound. There are a few more options, however, for NPC nodes.

Setting Breakpoints

Find an NPC node that has a few children, and load an audio file for this node:

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Click "Load Game", navigate to the xml file that contains the save data for your game, open it, and click "Start Game". You can click the red button when it is activated to respond to a particular piece of NPC dialogue. Try responding at various points, and see where it takes you in the dialogue tree. You might only have a few levels of dialogue for what you've created so far, but you can add many more layers.

Orphan Tab

Now we're going to learn about some of the more advanced features of the editor. You've probably deleted a node or two, or at least deleted some asterisks in the course of this tutorial. Find a node that has a few children, and click "Delete Node".

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The node you selected is now the target of the original node, and it's been removed from the Orphan Tab and brought back to the main tab. Likewise, the original target of the node you've just changed the target for will be moved to the Orphan Tab. You can use this feature to move entire dialogue trees around, in case you get stuck or make a mistake while writing, or just want to change the structure of your dialogue.

Orphan Tab Notes

• Deleting something from the Orphan Tab is permanent, either a node or a node tree! Be sure you want to delete it before you click the button.
  
  
• Clicking the "Delete Node" button on a node that has children will only delete the node that was clicked; the children will still be present in the Orphan Tab individually. Use the "Delete Node Tree" button if you want to delete a node's children as well.
  
  
• Nodes on the Orphan Tab aren't targeted by any nodes, and thus won't appear in the program.
  
  
• Nodes on the Orphan Tab can still be edited as usual, and can have their targets changed just like nodes on the main tab.
  
  
• Nodes on the Orphan Tab will be remembered when you save and re-load a game you're working on.

Placeholder Nodes

What happens, though, if you want to set a node that's already on the main tab as the target of your node? Let's try it. Go to the main tab if you aren't already there, click the asterisk button on a PC node, or click on an asterisk in an NPC node text box to open up the node target box. Instead of setting the target to an orphan node, set it to a node that's already on the main tab (it isn't labeled as Orphaned in the drop-down menu).

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Placeholder Node Notes
*Placeholder nodes are only created when you set a node's target to another node that's on the main tab. Otherwise, the selected target and its children will be moved over from the orphan tab.
*Placeholder nodes are deleted permanently when you click the Delete Node button, even on the main tab.
*Changing the target of a node on the Orphan Tab to a node on the Main Tab will create a placeholder node.
*If a node that has a placeholder pointing to it gets moved from the Main Tab to the Orphan Tab, the placeholder node will be replaced by the original node and its children, and the original node will not appear on the Orphan Tab.

Conclusion

This concludes the tutorial on the basic functionality of the editor. Once you're familiar with building node trees, setting breakpoints, changing node targets, using the Orphan Tab, and creating placeholder nodes, you should be all set to create your own Click To Speak game! For documentation on some really cool and more advanced features, see Variables and Rules.