Parlance

Dialogue ladders

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

You need a character and two dialogues; the gatekeeper from the previous tutorial works. Create a second dialogue for them, dlg_gate_after — what they say once you're known: "'Back again? Gate's open for you.'"

1. Build the ladder

Open the character. The Dialogue Ladder field is a reorderable list of rungs — each a dialogue plus an optional condition:

  1. Add rung → dlg_gate_after, and give it a show if condition: flag talked_past_gate is true.
  2. Add rung → dlg_gate_first — leave its condition empty. The row reads — always (fallthrough).

(In dlg_gate_first, make sure some choice or end node actually sets talked_past_gate — a flag read but never written is a FLAG warning, and rightly so.)

Top-to-bottom, first match wins: an unknown player falls through to the first meeting; a known one hits the gated rung. The order is the logic — which is why the rows reorder with ▲/▼ instead of asking you to write priorities.

2. Watch it resolve, live

Open the ladder preview on the dialogue surface. It shows every rung and highlights the one currently winning, with quick toggles for the flags the ladder reads:

The preview runs the same resolveCharacterDialogue the engine runtime uses — what you see is what ships.

3. Break it on purpose

Drag the fallthrough rung (dlg_gate_first — always) to the top with ▲. Save, and look at the validation bar:

⚠ [LADDER] rung 1 is unconditional — rungs below it can never be selected

That's a dead rung: an unconditional rung anywhere but last shadows everything beneath it. Your gated scene became unreachable — and instead of discovering that in a playtest next month, you got told at save time. Move it back down; the warning clears.

The other shapes the LADDER family catches: a stuck rung (unconditional and effectful at the top — re-fires its effects on every re-entry, forever), no fallthrough (last rung gated, so the character can resolve to nothing), and stranded speakers (dialogues whose character has no ladder at all). Deleting a dialogue a rung points at is a hard REF error, not a warning.

4. The idiom to keep

Most characters in most games are exactly this shape:

1. dlg_confrontation   if the_big_flag        ← most specific on top
2. dlg_midgame_hints   if met_character
3. dlg_first_meeting   — always (fallthrough) ← safety net on the bottom

Read the demo's three suspects for the pattern under real pressure — evidence-gated rungs over a fallthrough, so talking to anyone twice feels alive. A character's ladder is their arc, in one screen.

Where next