Creating a Visual Novel in the Godot Engine

1. Introduction: Have you always wanted to make a game? Maybe you've always been into reading. Have you played some visual novels that have grabbed your attention? Well, come on in and join this course and find out how you can go ahead and make yourself a visual novel and maybe yours will be the next big thing. Look at all these great ones out there. 2. Download Godot: Alright, if you do not have the Gato Godot Engine, however you want to pronounce, it. Doesn't bother me, but if you do not have it, you can head on over to their website, Godot engine.com or.org. I always end up typing the wrong one up there. And I head on over to the download section. And just give that a minute to load up. And you see you can get the standard version or a motto. Motto has she C-sharp sport? As it shows that since we'll be using JavaScript, you only need to grab the standard version. All your platforms is there at the top. Basic requirements. And there you go. If you know how to use Sqoop, you can use Sqoop. Go ahead and pick up dissension. You could also pick the engine up over on its dot io and on the Steam platform. So there's a wide variety for you to go ahead and pick this up. Really, it's up to you personally, I use steam, but in the end it doesn't really matter. All right, so it's as easy as that. Go ahead and pick that up and I'll see you in the next row. What will get the project started? 3. Placeholder Character: Alright, so starting off before we can actually start creating ourselves a visual novel and learning how we can go ahead and create those are create that setup. We're going to need characters of some sort. So for this, I'm just going to show you how to, how we can make a simple silhouette of a character here using just some basic shapes. It'll be very easy for you to follow along with. You can use any art program that you would like. If you really wanted to, you could use something. You could use Microsoft Paint and then use a website to remove the background if you really wanted to. But there's tons of free alternatives out there. What I'm using here is Affinity Designer. And I just have everything black yours so we can see what it's like for a silhouette. If you really don't want to make a character yourself, then as long as I remember I attach this video will be this little placeholder character that you can use. Alright, so let's go ahead and jump in. I'm just going to go ahead and hide that. What I'm gonna do is I'm going to use a rounded, a rounded rectangle here are rounded square. So I'm just going to go to maybe about there, get an idea of how wide I want the torso to be, the chest, the body. And I'm just going to pull it down until it goes off-screen. Alright. We're also going to need a neck. So I'm just going to use different colors to separate these here. And the neck is also going to be a, another rounded rectangle here. Again, fairly thick up to you. How long, short, thick, thin that you want to make your neck, your character. The head. Now, if you don't know how to create or structure a, a face, you know, maybe you haven't taken art lessons. Generally what you do is we generally start with something like a circle. And then in the end, our Middlemarch here, we would have the eyeline here. Maybe somewhere around here will be the nose or the sorry, the end of the nose, the nose tip. And somewhere in that area here is where you have your jaw line. Now, if you're familiar with a lot of visual novels to have more of this anime style. It's going to come from almost like a triangle point and it's going to come out to the chin from that point and up on the other side. Now how long this chin is obviously going to be vary from character to character. So all we're gonna do is I'm going to use this triangle and I'm going to use when to use green. Sorry, I'm going to use green so that you can see this clearly. So again, using my line that's gonna be about there. We're gonna go there roughly in length. I'm just going to create it. Flipped my triangle around. And we're saying if this is the eyes, then roughly around here is gonna be the nose tip. So I'm just going to lower it a little lower than that. If I zoom in here, this will make it easier for me. I'm going to make sure I'm touching the edges of my circle. And if I place this behind, I can get an idea of where I want the bottom of my chin to be. So you can see, you can have quite a variety in characters overall look as far as his head goes. Which will again come down to your own personal preferences here. I think I'm just going to go with here. My hand looks something like that. Alright, so I'm gonna go ahead and grab both these, bring them over. Obviously that's too small for that neck. So I'm going to make it larger. I'm just holding shift in this program to keep its size or keep his proportions. You should have something similar like that in the program. Choose to use what it is exactly. I'm not sure, of course. Somewhere around, there should be fine for this head. Alright. Now when we're looking at the rest of the body, What's the next main thing that we're going to see in a shop or in a bust. We're going to have the shoulders and we're going to have the arms come down. So let's see, I'm gonna go with more of our pinks here. Let's go ahead and create the shoulders. We look at the human body and we're thinking of the body as just basic shapes. Our shoulders are gonna be another circle. And then our arms are like long cylinders. Or in this case we're going to use a rounded rectangle there. So let's go ahead and create our shoulder. And I just realized it's the same color as our neck. Let's go with more of a yellow here. Alright, so we're going with that on our size. How you place it somewhere around there. We can always adjust that later. And for my arm, I'm gonna go with Let's see, Let's go with that selected the arm. Let's go with this solid purple. I'll grab my rounded rectangle here again. I'm just going to bring it down, take it off screen. A bit of a rotation so we can separate it and distinguish it from the body. Maybe thin it out a bit. For our basic shape. I'm going to copy my shoulder and arm because there's no need for us to do it again. So I'll copy and paste. And then just flip it, bring it over and we have something like that. Now of course, if you wanted, you could always organize these little more, like placing it behind the body. You can come in, maybe make your weeks. Maybe you want to shrink that neck a bit. I think for this character, we're going for a male, maybe something more like that. But this is the point where you can obviously go around and mess around with all of it. If I stick everything in a group, we can change the color of everything so you can see once you make it black, we're kinda getting the silhouette of a character. Now of course our character is bald. So if you want to put in some shapes in there to try and get some kind of hairstyle in the silhouette. Certainly can. But that's all I'm gonna do. And this will give us a basic silhouette or a placeholder image that we can do for our character. That we have ourselves a placeholder. And again, if you don't want to go through this, you're not liking how this is turning out or whatever. As long as I remember, this placeholder will be attached and the assets. Alright, so go ahead and save that. And we can start jumping into, into the project and learning how we can use or how we can create a visual novel. What plugins and add-ons we're going to go ahead and use to help us to make things smoother and a lot easier for us to put everything together. 4. Project Setup: Alright, so we have ourselves a new project here, started and open up. If you don't know how to create one again, just go ahead and launch the engine. I hit the New Project button, give it a name. In our case, is just a visual novel course. You can give it whatever name you would like and open that up. Inside of this project, I have created two folders, one for characters, one for scripts. Inside of characters, I have put our placeholder image in there. Alright, now, I was specifically asked are requested for doing this course and not only that, but specifically using the Plugin dialogic. Now it'd be this one right here by Emilio. Now, this plugin I know is being developed for, are being translated over to 4.0 as well. So if you are using for 0.0 in the future, this should still work just fine. This should all translate over. So let's go ahead and hit the download button here. And with all this stuff, we don't need the read me, we don't need a license. And let's go ahead and hit Install. All we want is to add ons folder. And okay, let it re-import everything, right, so now that our plugin has been added into our project, we actually need to activate it. So let's go up here to project, Project Settings. Go to the plugins section. And you notice here at the top where we have the asset lib script 2D and 3D. You'll notice up there we're gonna get another section called dialogic. As soon as we hit the Enable checkbox here. There we go. And now we're able to start using dialogic to create our scenes. That we want everything to happen. So I'm gonna go ahead and just create a new scene here. This is just gonna be a basic control node. And I'm gonna go ahead and save it and call this my scene manager. Go ahead and give that a save. Probably should have saved this inside of its own, its own folder or scenes. So I think we'd go ahead and do that new folder. Scenes, even though we probably only need the one, I still going to keep things a little organized. So I'm going to right-click my scene manager. And where is that it's moved to? I'm just gonna stick it inside my scenes folder. There we go. Alright, so that's all we're going to need with that. We can add a script to it. This will be going inside of the scripts folder. You create. Awesome. So we have a script ready for whatever we need to happen. And we have dialogic installed and ready to go. Our project is all that up and ready to start creating visual novels. That was quick, it was easy to do. Let's jump in and take a look at how we can create a character or a novel. 5. Creating Characters: Alright, so let's take a look at creating a character or a novel though. To do this, we're going to head over to the dialogic tab here at the top that was added from the plugin or the add-on that we got from the asset limb. So in here, we've got timelines, characters, definitions, themes, settings. We have a whole bunch of things here. But what I want you to do is I want you to not get overwhelmed with everything that's here on the side. The word about everything, the only thing we want to look at is the Characters folder here. So we're just going to have that selected and you'll see it looks like nothing happened. But what we're gonna do is we're going to go up here to the top-left, right above our folder list here. I'm going to hit the add character button. Right now you can give this character whenever you want. I just clicked into this tab here. And we see we've got character and we have an ID and that's going to create a JSON file. And that is going to be our character that gets created. Alright? Now, we can use the colored box here to select any color that we want. So if you have a specific color that's associated to that character, maybe you wanna go ahead and change that for now, I'm just going to leave that white. We can go to the display name. So this the name that will show up in game. If you want names to appear. If you don't want names to appear, now obviously you don't need to put a display name, but I'm gonna go ahead and set one here. Let's call this. Let's see. Let's go with Brad. Simple, easy name. And if you want to give nicknames, you can certainly do that here as well. You want to give the character description. This is my description of a character named Brad. He is a cool guy. You can put whatever you want in there. And when we get to Themes and we talked about those, you'll be able to select themes here if you really want something specific for that character. Alright, so here's where we have all of our portraits. So what all we need to do is we can import a folder. So if we have a specific folder of our character, we can use that and import all of our different folder characters in there are all the different images for that specific character. Or if you only have one or two, like we have here for our placeholder text inside a character folder. I'm just going to hit new portrait. Go inside of our characters folder and select it. Alright, so you see we've got quite a large, quite enlarged preview here. I'm showing you an actual siphon go to full view and we can see it there. And if you need to adjust the scale of it, you can either go back into art program, re-export it, or you need, you can adjust the scale that it's gonna be displayed out right here. Now keep in mind, if you do it here, gonna be for all your portraits on this character. Alright, so now we have Brad. He's got a nice little preview. And you see if we can come in here, we can add more. So we've got default, and then we can change the names of them so we can have a happy, idle, angry, yelling or whatever you want to have. Because normally in a visual novel you're going to have at the very least, different facial expressions, right? So if you want to go in there, That's how you can add them one by one. Or again, you can hit import folder and you can just select the folder here. So if I just got this back, just select characters. Now in this case, you'd go inside of characters and select maybe the Brad, older age hit Select Folder and it'll bring all of those n. Alright, so that's all we need to do. And we have now created a character. Now remember, you can come up here and you could change this if you would like. So let's say Brad, Jason. If you wanted to do that. More than welcome to you. It's not going to hurt anything. If we just save our project real quick. We look inside of dialogic here, you see we have all these folders with nothing in them. If we were to right-click on the Characters folder inside of dialogic opening a file manager. You'll see that your character adjacent file is right here. I don't think that's going to override it all know. But there you go, you have yourself, a character that's loaded in there. Perfectly fine. And we're ready to move on to the next step. What's, I guess we'll take a look at, I don't know, maybe themes or definitions next. Alright, take care. We're seeing the next one. 6. Creating Themes: All right, everyone, let's go ahead and take a look at, let's take a look at themes today or in this video. So a theme is basically our dialog box that's gonna be in use. So I'm just going to tell us, are basically show how our texts going to look on the screen. Are we going to have names? Are we're not going to have names. What colors texts gonna be, is this specific texts going to be a different color than this text? We're gonna be looking at all of that thing. And all we're gonna do is we're going to suck the themes folder here. We open that up. We have the default theme here. Now, if you wanted, you could go right up top here. Let's locate where it is. Which one of these? There we go. There's the Add theme button and you can create a brand new one. But what I'm gonna do is I'm just going to change the default one here because it's the exact same thing. You see. I'll hit Add theme. And you see we have a brand new one here that's based off of the default. So if you hit that button, it'll be exactly the same. I'm just going to right-click and remove that theme. Since again, I'm just going to change the default. So with this theme, I'm going to change the text color to, let's see. Maybe we go Something that's the text color itself. My mistake. I was looking for another section. Let's see. Name, label. There we go. So if you don't want names, can go ahead and hit the hide name label. And you could just get the texts there, which you may want to have a separate theme here for. Sorry for maybe just having a section of narration. So maybe you have a narration theme and then you have a dialogue theme. So maybe you do both wastes like that. Now, keep in mind if you wanted to use dialogic here for another game. Again, that's not a visual novel. You can certainly do that. All we would have to do here is you just have to worry about your texts and calling our are calling the dialogue that we're setting up to appear on the screen. So if you want to use it without visual novels, more than able to do that. Alright, so I'm going to keep the name up there because I think it's fine for having characters there. We have the background color here. So if you wanted to change the background color, say we select that, go up to more of a red. There you go. We've got a red behind the character, behind the character's name. And of course we don't want that. You can just turn that off. That's gonna be more of a personal choice, not really preferred one way or another, I would say. The same thing. You can put a texture behind it. You can modulate the texture picture, put your box padding, change the placement. So if you want it in the middle of the screen, I know some games that I've done that. I haven't seen any that do it on the right and the left is just a classic. So you got some preferences in there. And while we've gotten to is the name label, we can go to the tab to the left of that and we have the actual dialog box. And the same thing happens here. We can come in here, change our colors and everything just like we could before, just like we did with our name. Now you see in this case, dialog box is actually using a texture here. And if you wanted, you could do modulation, but it seems pretty dark, so modulate probably isn't going to do a whole lot in here. And you have all of your other options here, such as your scale, the fade-in time, portrait m times the size of your box replacements. So maybe you want your box to be in the center of the screen. The center, e.g. instead of being in the bottom, set up all your margins there however you want it to look. Alright, let's see. We have our font here. So if you want to set a specific font for your game, that's under our first half here of dialogue text. Our third option here is choice buttons. And you've got your normal hover focus pressed and disabled. So if you want to have different choices in your game, this is where you can modify those texts, colors, and the background and all of that stuff. Perfectly fine. And fully up to you, you see you can have a vertical or horizontal button layout. Now, the glossary. The glossary here is when you have words that maybe your user may not understand. So you want, maybe you want to put a definition in there for them. Or perhaps maybe you have certain keywords that are gonna be important for the user to remember. So you can go ahead and put in there a specific words that are going to have these different definitions that the player can quickly look at and understand or remember what that word is or why it's important and whatever. Now by default the word color is white. So if you want to have it as white, you can. I prefer to have something a little off about it. That way the player can notice it. And they might put their mouse over two or something to give an idea or to try and figure out why is this a different color. They see things happen and that gives them something to associate that color with. Whatever they don't know something. They'll know that this is a glossary term. And then our audio here. Now, audio is gonna be completely different based on whether you want to have different noises for certain situations, or if you want to have voice lines. If you want to have voice lines in there, you just go up to here two audio files. Okay? This here and you hear audio here. If you want to have the setup here. They have the texts noise happening as the characters pop up, you can go ahead and hit that. I use audio files. As you heard there for a moment. It's kinda loud. Maybe it's not loud on your end, but it's a little loud in my headphones. But you can modify the volume, the pitch, and all that. And again, you've got sound effects score if you're doing waiting, passing, choice, and all of that stuff. All righty. Let's go ahead and just make sure that we've covered the base of everything there. Everything looks fine here. Alright. There's all your different options that you can go ahead and tweak and look around at. But there's how you can create your different themes. Again, maybe have one for, maybe you can have different things for different locations, different things for your characters. And remember if you created a theme, a brand new theme, you can go back up to your new character and you can give them a specific theme specifically for that character. Alright, so that'll do it for our themes. Next, we'll go ahead and take a look at the definitions folder here. 7. Glossary Definitions: Alright, let's go ahead and jump into our definitions and start taking a look at our terms or our glossary. So we added a different color for that. But we need to be able to identify it. So let's go ahead and add the glossary, the name of this entry. Let's say, let's call it pizza. Write the title definition. And as you see here, a pop-up will display this information when a player hovers the word in a dialogue. So in coming here we say, pizza is a lovely meal. Typically made up of at least DO tomato sauce and cheese. You are able to, Let's see, No. Most People will add additional toppings. Alright, so we can go something like that. And just like that, we've added, we've added a term. So we can come in here, we can take a look. I can add another glossary entry, right? And we can come in here and we say, pasta. Pasta, bind. Pasta is a great dish or a great set dishes that he came from Italy. Here we go. Just like that. We now have 22 orders. Here are two definitions. So creating a definition is as easy as that. Pretty quick. We'll probably come back to definitions as you're writing your story or as you're writing things. So as you go through and you go, Oh, I think the player might need, that player might need to come back to that. Let me go and make a definition of that to help the player understand. So this is one of those things where you'll probably come back to the definition section multiple times as you go through your game. That's really all there is for definitions, creating glossary terms. Other than the customization there that we had in themes in the last video. That's all we got. This, the short one. But see you guys in the next one. And we'll jump into, I guess, creating timelines. Since that's what all we really have. Next up to start getting our game up and running. 8. Creating Timelines: So let's jump in and start looking at the basics of creating a brand new timeline for the dialogue in our visual novel. So I'm gonna go ahead and select the timeline folder here. And I'm gonna go ahead and click on new timeline. I believe is this button here yes, at timeline. And we can call this tutorial. So what I'm gonna do is we're going to want, is we're going to watch. We're going to want our character maybe to show up, right? So what we're gonna do is we're going to select character from our main event here. And our character is going to, you can have them join, leave, or you can update the character. Update them. As you see, we have different animations here. There you get set in how many times you want them to repeat. Wait for your animations. You've got all that information there. You can have your character leave the screen. Again. You have different automations for how they can leave. But what we want is we want our character to join the screen. We're going to select Brad or whatever you named your character. You have five positions here across the screen so we can go ahead and just select one. I'm just going to leave that on default for now. And what I'm gonna do is I'm going to hit Play timeline. As you see went through and nothing happens. So I'm gonna hit wait for animation that we, we wait for the animation to play. And we can see Brad was over there on the far left. If we select the third option here, brands can be in the dead center. So this is going to be where they are on the screen. I'm just going to stick with the far left. We saw there. Brad is a gigantic. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go back to my character. I'm going to modify his scale, maybe down to 25%. Come back to my timeline. Timeline hit play. That's a little small CC. Now at this point, you're just tweaking the values to something that fits, right for your game. That did not save. There we go. There we go. Pops up, we hit Play timeline. That previous not going to show up. Alright. That's a little disappointing there. But we'll see that in just a moment. When I show you how to call this timeline tax should be used. So what I'm going to use, I'm going to set some text here. We're going to say Brad is our character. I say, hello. Welcome to this amazing visual novel game. And we'll give it a little bit of excitement in there. Alright, so in order to get you guys to see this, I'm just going to jump ahead slightly here. And we're gonna go into our script and we're gonna get this running. So all we're gonna do is we're going to create a new variable wherever you want to call your dialogue. So we're just going to create a variable called new dialogue. And we're going to call the class dialogic. We're going to call it the start function. And as a string, this is gonna be the name of your timeline. So you see mine here is called tutorial. So in the script, I'm just going to call this tutorial. I believe I used a capital T in there. I'm not mistaken. I did. And then we're just going to add it as a child to our scene. Now when we run this, there we go. We have Brad shows up, we have our dialog box. And all we have to do is hit Space-bar or left-click and advance. Since this is the end of the dialogue tree, nothing else happens. We're basically just going to go into directly into the game closing. Or we would if it was just the timeline, since we're actually calling this from the script, everything's gone, the timelines over. So we have nothing else going on here. Which isn't fantastic. But at least you guys can now see when I do that, since the play timeline here wasn't getting captured, but now it is. Okay. All right, so there we go. We have characters, we have text. And if I go ahead and create a new line here, it's holding Shift and Enter or you can just hit Enter doesn't really matter in this case. As you see, you can create multiple lines of text here, but do be aware. We're not going to get multiple lines that way. Alright. Each line here is just going to be function as a new page. That's good to know. But if we were to come in and have it this way, e.g. this is more of the way I was thinking of how you see it's going to transfer over onto the next line. What you need to be aware of is you can have a massive overflow. So you need to definitely test and pay attention to your logic or pay attention what's going on. Because typically in a visual novel, you're not going to walk this scrolling. And even though we can scroll, as you see at the top and bottom, we have this very odd overflow, which in my opinion does not look very good in the slightest. So I would definitely keep an eye on that and cut off your texts at the appropriate time to set it onto a new line. That'll be something to keep in mind. It's going to go ahead and pull those out. And that is our basics of creating different or creating our text here and getting dialogue in. So if you want to, you can come in here, you can create a new character. And we'll say the second Brad comes in on the right-hand side. And maybe they come in from say, bouncing in. Alright, so we can go like that. And if we try this now, we have our texts, we have Brad would go to the next. We'll check. Wait for animation. There we go. Now while you wait for the animation to play before it ends. And that is not ending or starting. Alright, let's add a piece of text in there. Hello, I am Brad to see if that'll get us to hey there and hold. That faded out because we have a new character here. Now that we have a setup as two different characters. There we go. So the issue was we were using the same character on both of them. There we go. So if we have two different characters, you see one darkens in the background so we don't know. So we know that they're not talking. One who is talking is lit up. You can see we can have multiple characters all popping up here on the screen. And again, the position you are able to set is as simple as that to do dialogue for these. Now if you're having a one-on-one conversation, maybe you want your character to pop up right in the middle. Perfectly possible. Just 100% dependent on what it is you want to do. If you want to set a background. We come down here to let's see where's our section. There it is. So we can call the change background here. And maybe we can set the icon for the background. I'm not sure how that's going to look with it being the icon. Let's go ahead and take a look. And also while we're at it, you can select different sections here. And if you want to rearrange things, you can just grab it and drag it up. So I'm going to bring it all the way up to the tops and the background. That's the first thing that gets set. And there you go. We don't have a background for our visual novel. So if you want to set a background, easiest that, and with that, we have the basics here of creating a visual novel. We have our characters appearing. We have characters disappearing if you'd like. We've just got to come back down here. Character. We say leave. Which one are we using? Second, Who? Brad dot Jason. Second, wait for animation. And we'll have them bounce out. So we can have our character leave here at the end. Now that's extremely quick. So we can adjust the length. And there it goes, Brad. Goodbye. So there you go. We got changing backgrounds, characters, joining in, characters, talking, having multiple characters, and having our characters leave the scene. As well as we went over how to create or start our timeline inside of our project whenever we need it. Alright, so that'll do it for this one. Next, we still have plenty more things that we can go over with the timeline, play more features that we can add in and go over. So let's go ahead and add that in or go over that next time. 9. VoiceLines: Alright, so to do some voice acting for our game, if we wanted to have voice lines. You're going to need something to capture your audio with a free program. And popular one is Audacity here. You can go ahead and find it online. Very easy to find and fairly easy to use. There's tons of tutorials out there. So if you want to learn how to do all different kinds of effects, you can certainly find pretty much anything you need out there for it. To go ahead. I'm gonna go ahead and just do a simple line for our hello line here that we have at the beginning. The, if we remember the hello, Welcome to this amazing visual novel game. So I'm just gonna do that one line there as an example. So let's go ahead and jump in. Hello, Welcome to this amazing the visual novel game. So I'm gonna go ahead and stop it there. I'm going to just click and drag the section. I don't want hit Delete. I'll cut it off on the N2. And you can always come in here. You can analyze effect, generate, all these kind of things that you can use. So let's see, let's see if I remember how to do this, right. I'm looking for let's say Noise Reduction, get noise profile reduction now. And we'll say Reduce. I honestly don't know if I did that right. It could have been way off on that. It's been a long time since I've actually used this. But once you've got that set, you just come on in file and export it out. Now we can use, I believe this plugin accepts OGG and mp3. I'm not sure if there's any other types that it supports, but I'm gonna go ahead and I'll use an OGG file. And just go ahead and save it into your project. And since I don't have a folder here, I'll go ahead and just create one here. Or voice lines can also just call it audio. And we'll call this grad boreal one. And we'll hit Save. You'll have a metadata pop up here. You don't need to fill any of that out if you really want to. Again, I'm just going to hit okay on that. So once you've gone ahead and exploited your project, we can go ahead and jump back into the engine here and just let that audio import itself. There it is, voiced lines, brad. So what we need to do as well is just come on into our settings section here. We need to turn on enable audio for text events. And if you want your audio to go out to a certain bus, then you can go ahead and select it here. E.g. I. Only have master here. But if you're going to have voice lines and audio and sound effects and all that in your game. You can just come down here to the Audio tab at bus. We'll call this Voices. Of course voices are going out, will go out to your master because that's your master file. Everything goes out to the master volume. And now we can go ahead and select a Voices here. So now we can do voice lines and have it go to the audio bust specifically for voices. And now we can go ahead and create if we want it to, sound management. And we can allow the user to change how loud they are game is gonna be. I just reset this default. Yes, there we go. So now that we have that and we come back into our timeline, you may notice something here. Inside of our text. We have audio pickers here and we have lied one wouldn't come in here. We can now go into voice lines and we can select our file. And now when we go ahead and play this, we should now have a voice line here at the beginning of our game. Hello, Welcome to this amazing the visual novel game. There we go. And of course we don't have any audio for the next sections, but there we go. That's all we need to do. And now we have a voice acting put into our game. 10. Questions and Choices: Alright everyone here, we're gonna go ahead and talk about giving our player some choices, which obviously means asking them questions. Now, I say this because questions and choices go hand in hand. You can put choices in the game, but you're going to usually have a question that is associated to that. And when you have a question by default, they give you two choices. You can add additional choices into that option. So let's go ahead and take a look. So after Brad leaves here, let's go ahead and add a question block in here. As you can see, this drops down and you can put a character here if you'd like a character and ask questions. Or you can go ahead and add whatever you want for your questionnaire. And of course, since this is text, you can add a voice lined in there if you so choose. So let's go ahead and we can add, Would you like to keep learning? And of course by default, you got ecosystem here. So you can say yes or you can say no. Now, depending on which one you want here, of course, you would ideally want us to branch off or have some kind of effect on the game or in some way. Alright? If you're doing a romance novel, maybe this changes a point system that affects who you are able to proceed. A romance with? I don't know. But let's go ahead. We can go ahead and we can just grab a choice and we just drag it on in there. So if we want to have more than two choices, we can just bring them on in and add as many choices as we want. Now, you'll notice that there is a condition branch here. And if we were to enable that, once we get to values and going over that, you'll see this is where you can use this to check if this is equal to different from greater than etc. all the way through our standard procedures. And basically check if the value in value operator, whatever you have here. And if this is true, then this choice would show up. Now that might have sounded a little confusing. But when we go over values, we'll come back and go over this specific subject with choices here again. Alright, So I'm just gonna go ahead and delete those two empty choices because we just can have yes and no. And they're going to show off regardless. If you go ahead and select when you see that they highlight over it. And what we're gonna do here is we can then add in, say, a piece of text. And that is going to be related to that brand. So we can say, that's wonderful news. Glad you want to keep learning. And we can just add that there. And then if we say no, we can have different texts. Oh, I am so sorry to hear that. Frowny face. There we go. Now if we were to preview this and go through our timeline, we have our voice sign, we have Brad, Brad disappears. And then we'll have our question. Would you like to keep learning? Yes and no. So if we say no, we'll get oh, I'm so sorry to hear that. So we can have whatever happens from there, go off into that branch. And likewise, if we were to say Yes, we would go off into that branch where we would then have the wonderful news. You go. So really that's all, that's all there really is when it comes to choices. You pick a choice and then whatever you want to happen related to that choice, you just stick inside of that branch. So again, you can just bring it in. You can stick it inside of your branch. Easiest way of course is to select it and just go. But it's as simple as that. If you have your branches and things that go off on it, again, when we get to values, you can have your values being set here like I was talking, maybe have some kind of romance point system. And based off what you said, yeah, maybe you can add or subtract or whatever from those points or something. But alright, with that, that will do it for this section. That was very quick and simple for us to go over. Next up we can go into, we can take a look at the if condition or actually before we jump into that to clear that up. Let's jump into the values next. 11. Values and Custom Names: All right, everyone, let's go ahead and jump into it and start taking a look at the values. Now if you've got over GD script or other languages in the past, maybe you'll be familiar with the term variable, but that's essentially what a value is. And we can set it to a variety of different things. It's not quite as diverse as a variable, e.g. we don't have arrays or dictionaries or any of that. But typically we got, this were strings and numbers. Mostly, I have not tried with Booleans. If you want to give that a try, go crazy, Go for it. But here we go, we can go into variables right now. So we're just going to go up here in the top-left section here. And we're going to create a new value here, add value. And we're going to use this to get it to be our name or you know what? Let's call our value player name. So maybe our player doesn't have a name yet. Okay? So you can put something here, my default, and then she might change later. But we can also allow the player to do this themselves. And this will be a bit of cooperation between the standard GD script that we've got going on here and going into our novel. So before we can print it out, Let's go ahead and add in another book's not a character. I wanted to add in another value. And we can use this for say, age. And maybe our player character is 29. Alright. So now that, that is available, what we can do is we can go into our our timeline here. And right here it says Hello, I'm Brad, to say Hello, I'm Brad as well. And I AM. And then to insert our value, we have a pair of square brackets. And in-between those we type in the value name so we can type in age and we'll add years old. Now when we go into it, we should see the value replaced this piece in our text. So let's go ahead. And there we go. Hello, I'm Brad as well. I'm 29 years old. So we see that fills in beautifully and that fills in perfectly. Now, what if we want our character to have a custom name that is selected by the player. So what we can do is we can come on in. We can put in a line edit for our player to input a piece of text. We can go ahead and let's see signals. So say text entered. We just connected to our control. That's fine. And you can see here, this is what we're gonna be doing. Here we go. So we're gonna be calling dialogic dot set variable. And we named hours, player name. And instead of the texts Sally, that we have here, we're just going to pass in the new texts that gets passed in from our line at it. Now we're saying texts entered, so that's when we're going to hit the Enter key after type in our name. You can obviously set this to be a button if you would like. Now, obviously we can't start this yet because our player doesn't have a name. So I'm just going to set this to pass. I'm going to create a function. Start novel. Here we go. So when we enter our text, we're going to set the player name value. So we do set variable, the name of the value and what we want to set it to. Then after that, we're gonna go ahead and call start novel. Now, this works. We'll set our name. The problem with this now is we need to get rid of that line at it off of our screen. So after setting that, we're going to grab our line at it for it. So we can get it off the screen and out of the way. If you don't wanna do that, you can obviously just hide it. Now that we have that we need to actually set this name to be used. So let's go to our second Brad here. And just like before, we're going to have our square brackets for our display name. And we're just going to put in the value name, which is player name. Alright, now if we go back up to our timeline and take a look, We should we add brad and we did not have red there. That's right, because we did not set our name yet. Alright, so we can put it in our name here. We'll say, let's go with. Let's go with Spock. So unfortunately I hit the wrong Brad, I wanted the second brand that came in, but we've got the first one and you can see the name works perfectly fine. We typed in Spock and now that is our character's name here. If you wanted, you could allow people to go in and change the name of all the characters in your novel if you wanted to. You could set up like a name editor, as well as having yourself a set of default hands because you know, not everyone's going to want to change all the names there. Or you could just go a little more traditional and ask the player, but their name is. Or of course, finally, you could just not have a name option and only go ahead and use the values for things like age. If you wanted to do that or tracking points or whatever it is you want to do for your game or your game. And I wanted to go ahead and I said I would tux back up on these choices here. So we see how we have the word know here. Well, let's go into the condition. Now that we have options here, we can go ahead and check age, e.g. so when we say if that is equal to 30, then you have the option of saying no. So if you were to have this like a tutorial, then you would have an option like this to be asked if the player wants to skip it, something. But normally of course, if you're going to ask the player if they want to skip it, you're going to have an if condition. Put it in there. But let's go ahead for this example. So to player or the choice, no, it's only going to show up if age is equal to 30. So we know it's not going to. It's called the spark again. There we go. Named Brad, 29 years old, age is working there, 29. Would you like to keep learning? Our only option is yes, because age is 29 as we saw from Brad. What if we were to come in and change, it? Would go age. If we were to make this 30 and come back to our game. Here we go. Brag my, my sorry. Hello. I'm Brad as well. I am 30 years old since 30 matches the condition that we placed, we now have that option that shows up because that condition is true. We go. So there's what you can do with values. I've shown you how you can do player names, how you can set custom names if you wanted to go through and set up and named Editor for each of your players are each year characters. We've set up age. I've shown you how to use that in side of your conditionals for things like choices. I think that about covers it for values. All right, we'll see you in the next one where we'll go ahead and jump into the if condition. 12. if statements: Alright, so let's go ahead and jump into the if condition branch. So we had options here checking for the condition if our choices pop up, if they want to continue the tutorial. But what if they've already played the game before? They've acknowledged these kind of things and maybe have some kind of new game plus option in there to keep track of everything on one side a file. Well, let's go ahead and add a new value. Let's say completed tutorial. And we'll go ahead and set that to true. Or rather let's go ahead and set that to false to start with. And we have the tutorial. Would you like to keep learning? We'll go ahead and stick that inside of an if condition. Let's go ahead and see if we can grab all of this. You can just move this inside of the eye and it looks like we have to bring everything in one-by-one. Little tedious, I must say, but that's what you should be planning things out a little more will come in now, bring this in. At least it's not too terrible since we don't have a whole lot of things here. And bring our end branch. There we go. Alright, so now we have an F check. Now we can check if completed tutorial is equal to true, then we won't even get this question. Right. It'll be skipped because the player obviously knows how to complete it already. But if it's not, we're going to go into our tutorials here. After our branch here, we'll go ahead and we can set a value and we'll set completed tutorial to be true. Because if it's true, it's going to skip it. And if it's false, we're going to go through it. Once we go through it, we can mark it as true. So that's how you would go through that. Now you'd have to of course track that later on. But we can go through. We see since it is false by default, it's gets marked as true. Unfortunately, we don't really see that happen at any point. But you can believe me, it's happening. So if we come in here, we set this to Or how did we set that up? Oh, I'm sorry. I said if we set it up to true, it's going to happen. We want to set it to false. If completed tutorial is equal to false, then we will go through our little branch here I questioned branch. That is a mistake there. I had it on true instead of false. There we go, since it is on false, do you see what you like to keep learning? And we can say yes or no, it doesn't really matter. And then it will be set to true at the end of our branch. And if you have that set to true at the beginning, mistake, might just grab this. And to simulate this, say, what did we name it? Completed tutorial. Pleaded. Tutorial. So we'll take that and we'll set it to true to simulate if we came through this later on. If we came back to this a second time, the game it has now set to true as it's through. Our question is not going to be asked of us after Brad leaves. That'll be it for the scene. So again, there you go. There's how you can set your values. We're going over that as a, as a small bit of review there. And there's how you can go ahead and use values again for your if statements, which typically is how it's going to be set. And you can use that to determine if you want to, whatever to happen in this case, a question, but in your case, it might be a tutorial explaining some mechanics of your game, then make your novel unique. And I just want to make note here that if you're, if you're gonna do this for somebody's name, you should also call this should be string by default. I'm going to do that just so we can get the autofill here. But you should come in here and you should actually set this as the title case. Let's see, is it title, title in here? Which is going through node. It's not title, it is capitalized in this language, okay? Its title in Python. There we go. You don't have to put this string here. I just did that side hit the drop-down menu. And there we go. So now if a player types in a name, the first letter is going to be capital. Now we think should be a little more proper. So now if I go ahead and write, Spock was all lowercase. And we go in. We can see that the name had a capital S to a census showed that way. Everything fits in properly since it is a name. But that'll do it for doing the if statements, the if jacks here. So that'll cover pretty much all of our logic there. We have. At this point, we know how to display text. We have character, sorry. We know how to display text. We have characters entering and leaving the scene. We have characters talking to us. We know how to create different definitions for the glossary, for that to show up. And we know how to create different themes. And we can assign those themes to our players, are specific characters and want to have something unique to them. We know how to use values to keep track of different things as well as use them for things like player names. If we wanted to have something like that as well as insert them into a conversation to use them for f checks. Use them as a condition for whether or not certain answers pop up. In questions. We have covered a lot, a lot of stuff here. And the majority of things that you're going to need for probably most visual novels here. We do have to still have to go over saving and loading though, because what good is a long immersive visual novel if you have to restart it every time. So stay tuned for that. We got saving and loading. I don't think you really need changed name, you know what themes are. So shank, That's just going to affect your text. You can add background music. Of course, that's just going to be inserting an audio file just like we do a voice lines audio event again, similar thing. Insert a piece of audio. And that'll basically do it for now. So in the next one, we'll go ahead and tackle a little bit that's left for us here before we start jumping into creating a menu and wrapping it up. 13. Saving and Loading: Alright, let's go ahead and take a look at how we can save and load our visual novel here. Because like I said at the end of the last one, What good is having new long immersive, really good novel can't save where you are. It's like reading a book and then not having a bookmark. Doesn't make sense. You don't want to start over every single time. So let's take a look at that. How can we say, well, all we have to do to save is simply access the Save event there on the right-hand side here. And we can just bring this in somewhere. Now, let's set the bottom, which I'll use to show you an example of what this new game kind of situation is. But again, we can go in and grab it, bring it up. And let's say we bring it in here. After our second Brad has joined. But before he has talked, let's go ahead and set it there and we're going to use a custom slot. I'm just going to call this slot one. And that is where all of these staves are gonna go. Alright? So if we go ahead and play, it will have our safe happen. But to make sure that's happening, Let's go into our script, let's go into our ready function here. And let's go ahead and call dialogic dot, get slot names that will return a list to us. So let's store that list into a variable called slots. And we can print those slots afterwards. Alright, so when we start the game the first time, when notice in our output we have an empty list. Looks good. We have no saves in here. We can go ahead and put it into name and remember, our same is going to be right after the second Brad joints. So let's go ahead and have our voice line. Broadest joint should we should have already had our saved there as soon as he joined before that text box. So let's go ahead and close this and open this back up. We can see inside of our output console down there, we have swapped one listed there. Great. So we have a save and it works. But how can we actually load this information? Well, to do this, what we're gonna do is to make this a little more modifiable or be able to use this function. Start novel more than once. We're gonna go ahead and take our tutorial seen here and we're going to pull that out. We're going to pass this in as an argument. After we've entered text. For our function, we're going to add in a default argument, default parameter. And this is going to be, we'll call it time timeline. That's what they called it. And we'll set this equal to by default and empty string. So if nothing gets passed in, we have an empty string and there's a reason for that, that we'll get to in just a moment. When we started, we're starting a timeline. So we'll start whatever we pass in there. Now, what they also give you is you can actually add a second argument to this. And we're going to have a pop up. No. So the second argument here is basically a backup seen. So this is how you would have a, a new game plus kind of thing because you would have a save at the end of the game, right? And then when you go to load it, if the timelines over, if there's nothing there, no more data, then it falls back onto the second argument. And our second argument here is gonna be our Tutorial seen. Of course, she only seen that we have the only time line rather. So that's all fine, but how do we actually load the same? Well, we don't need our slot information there. If you want, you can just comment that out. What we need to do is the first thing we need to do is we need to load. So normally you would put this in a Load button. And all we're gonna do is call load. And we're going to pass in the slot. Now obviously this is gonna be slot one because that's what we named that save that slot right down there at the bottom. You can obviously use set up a whole save and load menu with this. So you can have all these different slots. And as soon as you click one, that's the information that gets loaded. Make sense. But if you don't want to have multiple slots like that, you'd obviously just have one hardcoded it like this, and this would go into your Continue button. Right after we load our scene, or sorry, after we loaded the data from that save, all we're gonna do is we're going to call start novel. And we don't have to put anything in as an argument because the default that we have here, this empty string actually tells it to start from the last point. Inside of this. Timeline that we loaded. So it's gonna go to that last point. So if we load this up, we should be right, where are saving this right here. And we should have Brad sing Hello, I'm Brad as well. I am 30 years old. As soon as we load our game. There we go. We have some simple saving and loading into our game here. Now, let's go ahead and have this at the end of our branch as well. So we can see how that works. So if we have slot one here as well, Let's go on to override that slot. Of course. If we take a look, this is gonna be after or completed. Tutorial has been set to true. So it's gonna be false. We're going to come into our question. We're going to answer it. It's gonna be set to true. Then our game is going to save. Now the next time we load up, we're going to load up that same slot again. Since our default position here is at the end, is no more game, it's going to fall back to the beginning of our game, our first timeline that we put in here. And once we do that and come back there again, since our complete tutorial is going to be true, we're not even going to get this question. So if you remember back where I talked about doing maybe a new game plus type deal, or have an option where someone can skip a tutorial after you've already played before. You can go ahead and have something like that in there. So let's go ahead and open it up. So we get through. We loaded in our correct location. Keep learning doesn't matter what the type here. And as soon as we hit our action button to go onto the next portion, we're going to say have a save and are. Value is gonna be set to true. Okay, now that it's been set to true, and we've had a save if we load up. We don't have anything here. Let's go ahead and starting our new game. Wiggly. You see, we started I gained from the beginning. And just as we continue here, we're not going to have that question pop up anymore. Because remember, our completed tutorial value is now set to true. So now that it's been set to true, now we go ahead and load in. And there you go. If we did not have any questionnaire, we skipped that whole chunk, that whole F check. And the question, I went right to the end where we have the next save. So there we go. There are some simple saving and loading that we now have introduced into our project. Now you can always set that saved to work with a button. If you wanted. If you wanted to save that manually. Let's take a look. I believe it'll just be save and then just the slot name. Alright, so we can go ahead and do that and want to double-check that. We can go ahead and I can go ahead and just set that. And then we'll go ahead and check the slots. So we'll say var slots equals dialogic, not yet. Slot names. And we can put these slops back out. As you can see that we have slot one in slot two. So if you wanted to have a Save button to save manually, That's how you do it. You would just call the save function and pass in the slot name for it. Alright? But they have it, we have saving, we have loading. You can assign it to buttons. You can just call it inside of your timeline there. As far as your shapes go, you can put your load into just to continue button where you have a hard-coded thing if you only want the one slot. Or you'll advance and have a bunch of empty slots that the player can save into. And depending on the ones they click, that's the one that's going to be saved and loaded in, are saved and loaded two. Right? There we go. Saving and loading is complete. We do have a signal that we could emit. So maybe we'll go ahead and we'll tackle that next time. 14. Dialogic Signals: Alright, let's go ahead and talk about how to use the signal. Now, this plugin has one signal, one signal that gets sent out and you have the option of passing in a piece of data a parameter, if you will, into it. Now, the problem with this is you cannot pass a value in, at least to my knowledge, at this point in time. And you have to connect the signal manually through this. Alright, so let's go ahead and emit a signal and is very simple. Now, right after, right after Brad leaves here, we're gonna go ahead and we're going to call signal. And you see where it's going to send a signal called dialogic underscore signal. And you could pass in any piece of information here. So let's say like e.g. maybe this is who you're player is dating in a visual novel. Let's call her. Let's call her, Let's see. Let's go with that's passed into piece of data called Hanukkah. Let's go with that. Now. That's cool, that that data is being sent out, but we need to actually receive that. And to receive that, we need the, need our dialogue to be created and added to our scene. So we'll come down here and we can call and get our new dialogue and call connect. Now if you're in 4.0, obviously connecting a signal is going to be quite different here. But for everyone in current three point x, we can go ahead and the first argument we pass in is the signal, which is Diao, dialogic underscore signal. We pass in the object that is going to receive the signal and have the function on which our self. And we can go ahead and pass in the name of our function that we'll call and we can just call signal received. Right now we need a function for that function signal received. And remember this takes an optional argument here because you don't have to send one. So I'll just call this data and set this to null by default. So it has, by default, it's going to be nothing. And if something gets passed in, cool. Now, depending on what you're doing here, you may or may not want the user to pass anything in. So if you never expected anything too bad to be passed in, you can always just leave this empty and have no arguments in there, no parameters. What we're gonna do is we're simply going to print the data that comes back to us, which from our signal should be Hanukkah. So let's go ahead and start it up. Hello, I'm Brad as well. It's there as well. I'm 30 years old. And as soon as Brad leaves here, which get the signal and Hanukkah should print out inside of our output console. So let's take a look. And there it is. So just like that, we can use signals to pass a piece of data. Some sort, if you need or use a signal as some type of trigger that you want to happen at a specific moment. And your novel. Alright, well, that about does it for emitting signals. Change scene is you don't really have any scenes, right? But this is where you would do this if you wanna go with multiple scenes rather than having one scene manager like we have here. 15. Call Node: Alright, let's go ahead and take a look at how we can call a node. And what this means is we're gonna get a note from a tree and we're going to call a method on it called a function. Now, I'm gonna do this at the beginning when we change background. So I'm going to use this example to actually delete our line at it. We don't have to do it inside of our code. It'll happen here at the beginning. So what we're gonna do is we're first going to put a script on the side, on our line at it. Put it in the right location. There we go. And load that. And as you see here, I've just created a function called delete and I've given it an argument of data, then I'm going to print out just because they can take arguments. So I'm going to show you that how that is working as well. But ultimately what we're gonna do is we're just going to call Q free on itself. And then inside of our scene manager, we no longer need this line here. When we've entered text. Since this is now going to be handled inside of our timeline when we start the game. Alright, so here we're going. We are going, where is our background? Think I accidentally ended up deleting that? Yes, I did. Well, hello, Welcome to the visual novel. I know that's not going to match up with the dialogue anymore. That's unfortunate. Let's just go ahead and put our background back in there, which had the icon. Alright, so all we're gonna do now is we're just going to use called node. And this going to take a few options here. Method, remember is delete, that's the name of the function and the target node that is going to be going down our tree here. So at the beginning we're going to have control. Now if you name these differently, obviously you're going to have to put the correct names in here. But going down, we're going control. And then the line edit like that. So we can access this line at it node. And on the scripts we're going to call the delete function. And I mentioned how we can have arguments in here. We can have as many arguments as we want. Of course I already have it set to one. So let's go ahead and pass in. This is my elite argument. Alright, so if we go ahead and write it now, we can put our name in. Now as soon as I hit the action key or the Enter key, or in my case, for this to do text entered. We take a look. We're going to set the player's name to what we have typed in there. We're going to start the beginning of our timeline, seen our timeline. And our timeline is going to set the background. It's going to go to our line at it called the delete method and pass in this argument. If we take a look, Here's our delete function and we have an argument here. We're going to print that argument that gets passed in. And then we're going to free ourselves to remove the line at it out of our scene. And then the rest will continue as normal. So let's go ahead and take a look. I got close on that. The character is or the portrait to move there. I'd have to fix that again. But that's not due to that. That's just because I apparently accidentally deleted it. Were Michigan joint event. That's why. But there we go. As you see, we called it down here in our output. We can see the argument we passed in. And if you want to see it delete itself. Up here, you can endure. On the left-hand side you have remote and local in, just go ahead and hit remote and you can see the tree as it's running if you don't have that. And fair option here. No. Okay. So it should just be there by default then. Alright. So if you want, you can go ahead and watch that. And when we type this in, you're going to notice the line at it over there disappear, which indicates that it is Q free to self and deleted from the scene. And there you go. So there's the call node. Here's how we can use the call node event here. 16. Menu Creation and Continue Slots: Alright, let's go ahead and take a look at how we can take everything that we've learned now, since we now know how to use the plugin. And let's take a look at how we can go ahead and create our simple main menu and have a ourself, our own loading menu or loading system set up there, as well as how to give the players option to create new game, continue, quit, and choosing the player name. So we're going to have everything set up. And after this, the only thing you would need to do is customize how you want your main menu to look and actually create the novel, of course. So let's go ahead. I'm going to create a new scene for this. And keep a hold of that old one. Just going to make this user interface. No reason, no real reason why we kept. And I'm going to call this my menu. Alright? Now, inside of this, I'm going to have a texture, right? Because every main menu needs some kind of background. Right? Now, the one I'm using here is from a visual novel called catalase showed you. It is completely free. It's very long, many branching paths. And it is an excellent, excellent story with a very good lesson, I guess you could say. Now can we shrink this down? No, we cannot share and expand on. And we'll just lower that just so that it fits here. There we go. Alright, so we have ourselves a screen. I'll go ahead and relabel this as background. We then need a set of buttons. Now, I'm going to keep mine very organized. So I'm going to use a VBox container. Extend the size of that. I'm going to place it right down here. So call this my button container. And inside of here, we're going to have three buttons. We're going to have new game button, continue button, and a Quit button. So we can go ahead and add our text in their new game. Continue. There's a U in there, and quit. Now obviously, if you want to have these spaced out a bit, you certainly can do that right here inside of our VBox container, we go to Theme override constants, separation. And then you can go ahead and go ahead and set this to whatever number you would like in-between of your buttons. I think I'm just gonna go with ten. That seems perfectly fine for me. And I'm just going to shrink that down there. Now obviously, if you have the more buttons and add to, to want to put it in here, the longer you're going to have to make this list. Alright? So we can go ahead there to do. All right, so let's start with our Quit button. That'll be the easiest one. I'll go ahead and add a script to my Quit button. Make sure this is set inside of the scripts folder. And create a mosque going to need to connect the signal pressed. Now connect that to our Quit button, this wall. We don't need any of this info. All we're gonna do is we're going to quit the game with this. So get tree dot. Quit. And we can go ahead and save our scene. We'll go into scenes. Menu is fine. Now when we run this, we have a nice little menu here and when we hit quit, the game closest. All right, So far, so good. Now, what if we want to continue or a new game? Well, new game is gonna be fairly easy because we've done this inside of our scene manager here for the most part. So we're going to need our start novel here. I'm just going to copy that over. And I'll put that into my new game script. This under Scripts. I'm gonna go ahead and posted my start novel function in there. We're going to go ahead and go like that. I'm going to set, create a variable here for starter scene. And I'm just going to set that equal to the current time being our tutorial seen. And what I'm doing with this is I'm setting, this is gonna be our brand new game, right? So our starting scene, I've, regardless of whatever happens. So we should just be able to call start novel and pass in our tutorial. Alright, so we'll go ahead and call that there. And we want on pressed. We want our signal. What our new game gets pressed. We're just going to call Start novel and we're going to pass in our startup scene. Alright, so now when we run this, if we had quit, the game closes and if we hit new game. Now we know in our game starts, we'll jump right into our visual novel. Boom, there we go. Fantastic. So at this point we should have a save. What do we have here? Yes. We don't have that signal in there. That's fine. That's because we're using the menu and not using the C Manager anymore. Alright, but with that, we have our saving here. If you remember, come on down, we have a Save here. So we do have a save and we have slot one, which means we can jump into our Continue button in getting that sub to work with different save slots. And we can also get our new game button here. Go for suffer, continue. We're gonna go ahead and we're going to set a new script on there. Again, we can take our Start novel. You can always put start novel in its own, in a global if you wanted to. Or I guess not really a global sense. So we will need, we do have the signal here. But I'm just going to comment that out. But here we go. We have a dialogue, we have that. Alright, so let's say we have this. We'll copy over our startup scene just in case. In back that out. Here we go. Connect are pressed signal or continue. And when we continue, all we have to do is cause start novel. Remember our default is going to be this empty string, which will be passed in as our, There we go as continuing from the last say point. But what Ross going to need to do is rush going to need to load in our information. So take a look at our scene manager. Remember we need to call load. There we go, so we can call it load and our slot one before starting the novel. Now, if you want to have this setup, so we have multiple slots in here. When I use a continuous then all we would need to do is instead of loading when our project starts or when the Continue button is hit rather, you can go ahead and just go into dialogic die. Yet slot names, assign this to a variable. And then for every slot that's in there, you can go ahead and list these out in a separate menu. And then every slot that's there, every slot that's there, you can go ahead and save it. Every slot that's there, you can provide a button for the user to click on. And every everything that the user can click on R, depending on which slot the user clicks on. You sat, you can set a value for the actual novel to know what or where it's going to save you. All right, So I've gone in and I've added a new value of current slot and just set that for my save slots here. So now you can come in and you can set current slot. To whatever you would like. Of course, by default, we can have slot one. And then if you want to have multiple slots, you can just set the value of current slot to whatever slide you would like and save it that way. E.g. here we can go ahead and slot one and we can take a look at his work now I think my saves were just a little buggy. So what I'm gonna do here is I'm just going to create a ready function here and just reset my saves. Rosette saves. And if we run that kind of access, right, definition curse on saving, but it didn't exist. Not the one we want to go erase like. So. Then we go and I'll just do this for slot 12.3. So I can clear out all of my saves. Let's now continue. Do nothing. Interesting how it's able to outright, it's not actually loading anything. If actually going jump into our starter, seem like it should, okay. That we might have a little bug there, but we're good. Alright, so we can see here that we have no slots available. So that's fine. If you wanted to keep this in here, you can, but I'm just gonna go ahead and get rid of it. And we can go ahead and define. In this case, we're loading Slot once are you, are you need now is a way to determine our way to set what slot. It is a 21, a load, which is going to be heavily dependent on your game. So we'll say, let's go ahead and set up our continue as if we have multiple saves. All right, so let's just go here. And for this, we're gonna go ahead and create a, another control here. Just hold our information and we'll call this the what do we call it say the load menu. And then inside of here we will have a VBox container that will hold slot container. Never go. And we can do something like the following. Grab everything and let's set this to the center. The center up there. That's not what we want. So let's go ahead and set this or load menu to hold rack. That way our site container can actually be in the center. Alright, so now that is perfectly set. What we need are the abilities to create some slots. Now, depending on how you want to go about this, you could do this in a few different ways. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go ahead and create some buttons here to three. Okay? So I'm just going to go like that. Just for now. I'm going to call them like so slot one button to button, three, button. There's no k in the word what? And slot for. But alright, I'm gonna go ahead and add some text here to slot three. Slot for. I'm going to add some more spacing. And my theme override. That way we can't get any confusion. And I'm only going to allow for slots for my game. Alright, so we're gonna go like that. I doubt by default, what I'm gonna do is I'm going to hide the menu. And inside of my continued script. I'm going to create some new functions. I'm going to create one for show. Load menu or go save slots. And in here we're going to pass down a, a parameter and argument of slots, which must be an array. And when our continued button gets pressed, what we're gonna do is we're gonna get all of our safe slots. Logic, dot, get slot names. All right. So we're gonna go ahead and grab those. And we're going to pass those into our show save slots. Now what we can do in here is we're going to do where are we at? We need to go we need to go up to our parents. So we got to go up two. So I'm going to set menu is set to parents. Parents to make it a little easier. Now what do menu dot node, load menu. I said Men, menu. Here we go. We're gonna get our load menu. We're going to set it to visible to true. And now for our slots here that we need to check our swatch container, I'm going to come down here. I'm going to create another variable for slots. Container equal to load menu slash slash container. And we're going to do a for loop for slot, in slots, container, dot, get children. Alright, so we're gonna come down here. So what we're doing is we're calling get children on the slot container that we have here. We're gonna get all of these items one by one. We're gonna go through all four of these swap buttons we have here. And all of these are gonna be represented by the word slot. So if we do slot dot name, it's going to give us the name of this, which is gonna be slot one or slot two buttons, slot three buttons, slot for button. So what we wanna do is we want to check if slot, I'm sorry. If yeah, if we wanted to do this, to want to do a double loop. Let's just get rid of the word button off of here. Now instead of just getting rid of the button, I could have just used the tech. I'm just going to get rid of the word button. So I'm gonna say four. First slot and slots container. If slot dot name and we're looking for and our slots, then slot visible equals true. Else slot visible equals false. Alright, so if we were to run that and hit Continue, nothing popped up. Why did nothing pop up? That that that should have had an effect there? And while we're at it, let's go ahead and add a color correct in there. So we can add a darker value. And here, it's kinda darken it off from everything else for a nice separation. So if we were to run this, that is visible. Just great. But when we're in here, this does not seem to be work. He's going worked out. Okay. So there we go. So for whatever reason that didn't appear to be working, but it seems to be working right now. So you see our screen darkens as if we're going to show a load menu. But we have nothing here. We have no slots to show. Which is fine. Although as you see, we did have one issue. And that is when this is up, when we have no buttons, we have No, No Exit button there. So let's go ahead and add one more button. We'll call this the back button. Sap the word back. And we can go ahead and just set, I'll set this whole thing to the bottom. Right. Here we go. And I'm just going to pull that out of the corner a bit. So when the Back button gets pressed, we'll go ahead and give it a script. When it gets pressed, all it's gonna do is remove connect. All it needs to do is hide the load menu again, to get parents, we should be able to just call the height function. Alternatively, you could just call it visible dot. There we go. So we can see that works but visible equals false. We see, there we go. That's working just fine. Now how do we know if our loop here is working? Well for that, we have to actually save our game. So just as an example, I'm going to go into our tutorial thing here. I'm going to manually set this to slot one. Must remember that is what a capital S. So I'm going to set that to slot one. Play this timeline real quick. Alright, so we've had the bad Brad join. So we should have had a safe point there. So if we were to test out our continued button and this NOT function, and we're getting no safe slots. Am I erasing it still? Did I forget to remove that? I am there's there's my issue. I'm Stella still erasing. I didn't delete that out of there. Actually, what I want to do is I'm just going to comment that out in case I need to clear out my savings again. We're there we go. So that was just user error. So if we were to try it now, new game, we get in, we get our Save. All right, that should work. So now we jump into our Continue and we see we now have slot one. Now we have to do is hook up slot one to actually load slot one. And we would be good to go. And for this, we can actually use a single script on all of these if we code it correctly. So scripts, and we'll just call this our slots, fine. Alright. So what we're gonna do here is we're going to have var slots equals self dot name. So now this should be equal to swap one slot two, slot three slot for et cetera. Let's take a look at our Continue button. Since we're doing this here now, we no longer need start novel and set up our Continue. We can remove that, put that inside of our slot here. We don't have a starter seen there, which should never be an issue because we should only have safe slots that are visible are that are in use. We have to get parents there. We're going to need we're going to use three just so we can put it all the way up. Alright, and what did we miss it now started, we need to connect ourselves. So let's create a ready function. We need to connect our own signal again, if you're doing this in 4.0, the connection is gonna be slightly different. So let's go ahead and we'll do self dot connect. Looking for pressed against self load slot, real, so on. We can create our function load slot. And all we're gonna do here is we're going to call start novel and pass in. We don't have to pass in anything, but we do need to load, logic, load and we can pass in slot. All right, so now that should work. When we hit our, our loading button. Let's go ahead and find out continue slot one. Alright, so that is gone that far. This hopefully load that up proper. Know that is restarting. Okay, So using slot dot name is not going to work there. So I'll go ahead and use slot there. And what we're gonna do is, since that's not going to work, we'll go ahead and use export. This. Now if you're in a 4.0, you're going to have to use the at symbol here at the beginning for export. But we'll go ahead and do that. And then inside of the inspector, we can see we have slot here and we can slot one. Oh, where did my variable go? Classified as a string. There we go. Slot one. And now we can copy this script onto all of our others on a slot 23.4. And just correct. All of these. You got a four and you go to three. Now that I think about it, we could have also oh, no, we couldn't we couldn't use the texts because we do have a space in there. Okay. So now our continued should work with multiple slots. 17. Remember To Set Slots: Something that I wanted to throw in there that I completely forgot to mention as she didn't want to remember to set the variable. If you're doing custom swatch here. If you remember here we had current slot was the name. And it will just come back to our scripts. So we want to set the current slot to whatever slot is. So just make sure that you're doing that, that way. You can make sure that you're saving in the right slot when you are, after you continue the game. Just wanted to throw that in there because that's gonna be a very important thing when you continue your game. Otherwise, your game might not save or might save over the wrong slot. 18. New Game: Alright, now what about our new game? Well, for new game, we're going to give the player the ability to set their player name if they would like, before starting, as well as selecting their safe slot. Alright, so we'll go ahead and create a, another section here. Let's say new. I'm sorry. We're gonna get a want to get a V box. No. No, no. We'll just go with the we'll go with the standard control here. We'll call this the new game menu. Inside of here. Let's also do a, another color wreck. Wreck. And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go to the color wreck that we already created. I'm going to select this screwdriver and wrench here. I'm going to hit Copy Properties. I'm gonna go to buy new color wreck. Hit that again and paste properties. That way we can keep things consistent with our darkness and everything. Now, what do we need it in here? We're going to need a line at it. For our name. We can go ahead and center this. We're gonna need a label of some sort so that our user knows what they're supposed to be doing. Player name. Again, we'll set this to the center and then we can just lift it up. Now you can always tweak this thing yet theme overrides and play with the colors, outlines. I like colors, constant fonts. You got all that stuff that you can mess with here. If you'd like, as well as just completely creating a whole new font, if that is what you choose, will go ahead and we could do player named there. Actually to save on that alternative, we can just go to line next line at it as a placeholder tax rate. Yes. There we go. So we can just go like that. And that'll play or no, to put a player name. Now, some people may not hit Enter by instinct. I may just have a normal button. Go ahead and send her that. Some people may not hit Enter and be looking for an Okay button and be lost. Some people may not. So we're gonna give them, give them that option. Alright, so we have that set where a player name, we need to have that pop up when we hit new game. And then from there, we're going to need to also select a slot for our new game. So we'll go to, let's see, what do we have for buttons here for signals crashed but not buttoned down, toggled. Let's see. We could do slough that way. We have many different ways that we can go about doing this. Let's go with let's go with or buttons. Do we want to toggle them? No, no, no. Let's go with an option menu, option button. Alright, so we'll come here. I do want to set the layout to there. Now we have the anchor in the middle and we can set a safe slot. Where do we do not have anything there, okay. This is our say, slot oxygen. And if you want to add items by default, you can come up here and go to add and you can stick them in this way, which is perfectly fine. Selected or select slot is what we'll do for the first one. And it'll be disabled so the user cannot actually pick that one. And we can go ahead and add more items. So let's say slot one. I keep hitting the wrong button or not the wrong. Well, but I keep hitting okay down there. Who do slot two? Slot 3.4. All right, so we have four options here, and let's set this to pop up with our new game. But we can go ahead and check that real quick. So we see there's all of our slots so we can pick from. So now we need to make sure that our OK button isn't working by default until a safe slot has been selected. And new game. Here we go. So again, we won't be using star novel here. Now we'll be moving this to a new selection or a new spot. But for now, when our new game button gets pressed, what we're gonna do instead is we're going to go up to our chain of get parents. Again, a better way or a easier way, preferred way, whatever you wanna call it, would be to send a signal. Since you're going up the tree. Usually you want to send a signal if you're going up. But in this case, since there's zero chance of us having issues, like we would in a standard game. It's, it's fine for us to use Git parent here. We have no future problems that we can run into. So let's go ahead and get parent duck, get parents. Let's see, that'll put us at the top of the menu there. Perfect dot, get node. And then we want to get our new game menu right there. Visible equals true. Alright, so if we turn that off by default, and now we come in, we hit new game. There we go. We're ready to start. Our button. Here. Are OK button. I'm gonna go ahead and set disabled on in the inspector. And now this is where we need to set ourselves up. Since we're doing multiple things here, we need the Okay button when you do slots, I'm gonna go ahead and I'm going to put our script on our new game menu. Now, where you put all of these is completely up to you. If you really want to, you could stick all of these into one script. I wouldn't recommend it, but you certainly could. Alright, so we have that, set that and don't eat that, and we won't need these. Alright, so we're going to need some signals here. We're going to need a we're not going to use text centered. I think we're just going to use the Okay button. And let's save slot item selected. And we're attach that to our new game menu. So when we select a new item and are safe slot. And when we hit the Okay button, those are the two signals that we're going to need suppressed for our OK button. Alright, now, if we go back to our new game button, this is where we have our start novel, where we can now take that out and add that to our new game button. Alright, so when our button gets pressed, obviously we're going to start the novel from our starter seen to start a new game. And when a save slot has been selected for my drop-down menu, much like we do in our Continue button. We need to actually set the safe slot. Where did we set that? Those are those visible. We had it right here. So we need to actually set this variable. Of our current slot. Now the question is we don't know what slot is at the moment. So we're gonna have to create a variable called slot. And if you're wondering how I'm just quickly commenting and uncommenting. It is the shortcut of Control K and might be command, might be Command K on Mac. I don't know. It's been a while since I've used it on a Mac. But there we go. We have that, we have our variable, but now we need to set this variable to it and do that. We're going to do we'll set that equal to Our save button. Save slot option. Item. Checks, pass in the index. Now I need to double-check my items here. And I have spaces in there. I'm gonna go ahead and just delete those spaces. There we go. And now we should work perfectly fine with an option selected. And then we can get our OK button. And we can set disabled equal to false. So now that we have are safe slot selected. So let's say we shouldn't make sure if slot and we need to check our line at it and line at it dot txt not equal to an empty string. There we go. So this is basically going to check to make sure that we have selected a safe slot here. And we have typed something into our line at it. Alright, so now if we just select a slot and nothing happens, you have to put a slot and type something in there. And we can see that is triggering. Now, we don't want that to happen only when we select a slot because as you saw there, I had to change slots and then come back because I picked my player name second. So let's go ahead and set that to text changed. Send that signal to our new game menu. And what we're basically going to do there is we're going to this same if statement here. So whenever our exchange, right, it does not know what slot is. We'll just come up and will create slot up top there and set it down there. Simple. Now it shouldn't matter what order we do that end. We could do the slot burst and then type, and it's fine. Or we can type and then select a slot. And it's fine. Awesome. So let me just hide that and make sure it's working. We'll go in, select New Game. Let's say the sow save slot three. Okay, We'll go through, we should have had a save at that point. So we'll go back, started up again, may continue. And now we have a safe slot through here available. And we hit that. No timeline specified. And yet slot one works. So why are we having an issue in slot three? Because we have a space there, we should not have a space. Alright, so that's user error there. I need to remove those spaces out of that slot variable. And now if we go to Load slot three, There we go. So now we can create a new game. We can continue games. We have multiple save slots setup, we can exit. We have essentially everything we need now, all we have to do is create characters, create backgrounds, create a whole story, and a whole world for our user or player to enjoy. I hope this course has been helpful and educational to you to towards getting yourself a visual novel. I'll set up, started and ready to go.