Parlance

Dialogue offers

Goal: a character whose conversation changes when the world does — plus a deliberate offer mistake, caught by the validator, then fixed. ~10 minutes. Concept background: dialogue offers.

You need a character and two dialogues; the gatekeeper from the previous tutorial works. Create a second dialogue for them — Dialogues → + New → dlg_gate_after — and give its entry node what they say once you're known: "'Back again? Gate's open for you.'" In the inspector's Dialogue section, set its Default speaker to the Gatekeeper too.

1. Declare the offers

Each dialogue says when it should play — you set it on the dialogue, not on the character. The Offer lives in the Dialogue section at the top of each dialogue's inspector:

  1. dlg_gate_after → + Offer this dialogue, then set offered when to flag talked_past_gate is true.
  2. dlg_gate_first → it already has an offer from your first project, with offered when empty — always (the fallback): offered whenever nothing more specific applies.

(dlg_gate_first must actually set talked_past_gate — the branching tutorial does it on the success node. A flag read but never written is a FLAG warning, and rightly so.)

There is no ordering to manage: an unknown player has only the fallback available; a known one also has the gated offer, which is more specific, so it wins. The engine picks — you just state each scene's situation.

2. Watch it resolve, live

Look just below the offer: the inspector's Resolution preview shows the character's offers, marks which are eligible right now, and highlights the one currently winning — with quick toggles for the flags the offers read:

The preview runs the same resolveCharacterDialogue the engine runtime uses — what you see is what ships. It starts from the project's default state; the same preview also lives in the Play panel (▶ Play → Dialogue Offers), where it resolves against the playtest's current state instead.

One-shot by default: Replayable

Resolution skips any dialogue the player has already seen unless it is marked Replayable (the checkbox in the same Dialogue section). Nothing is replayable by default — most scenes should happen once — so a played scene drops out of the character's offers.

That matters here. A player who fails the rhetoric check never sets talked_past_gate, so on their next visit dlg_gate_after isn't eligible — and dlg_gate_first, already played, has dropped out. The gatekeeper resolves to nothing. Tick Replayable on dlg_gate_first so the turned-away player can try again. (The validator can't see this one: it depends on what the player has played, not on how the offers are written.)

3. Break it on purpose

Give dlg_gate_first a gate too — set its offered when to flag talked_past_gate is false. It saves as you pick; look at the validation bar:

⚠ OFFER character 'npc_gatekeeper': 2 offer(s) but none is unconditional (dlg_gate_after, dlg_gate_first) — resolution returns no dialogue in states where every 'when' fails (add a fallback offer with no 'when')

Now both offers are gated. These two gates happen to cover every state between them — but the validator doesn't try to prove that. It asks for one ungated offer as the safety net, because a pair of gates that covers everything today stops covering it the day someone edits one of them, and then the character resolves to null — nothing to say. Instead of discovering that in a playtest next month, you got told at save time. Clear the gate again; the warning clears with it.

4. The idiom to keep

Most characters in most games are exactly this shape — a few gated offers over one fallback:

dlg_confrontation   offered when the_big_flag     ← most specific
dlg_midgame_hints   offered when met_character
dlg_first_meeting   (no gate — the fallback)      ← safety net

There's no order to get right: each scene names its own situation, and the most specific eligible one wins. Read the demo's three suspects for the pattern under real pressure — evidence-gated offers over a fallback, so talking to anyone twice feels alive.

Where next