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Quick Start

You've installed and enabled the plugin (or have you?). You have the characters, plot, and the worldbuilding of your story ready, or maybe not, thats ok too. Lets start by writing a Dialogue.

Writing the Dialogue

Create a new text file in your project. And write your dialogue with the following syntax:

Actor's name:
    "The Dialogue syntax are designed to be human readable,
    similar other data formats like YAML."

Actor's name:
    "You just need the character or actor's name,
    with `:` at the end."

Actor's name:
    "And the dialogue body indented."

Actor's name:
    The quotation marks are also entirely optional,
    everything you wrote is displayed as is.

Save it as *.dlg file. Here we'll save the file as res://intro.dlg. Now that the Dialogue is ready, let's set up the Stage.

More on writing Dialogue here.

Setting up the Stage

Nodes & UI

Create a new 2D or User Interface scene. We'll use User Interface scene, which use Control node for the scene's root. And add the following nodes:

  • TheatreStage, Label, and DialogueLabel

To tidy things up a little, add PanelContainer, and VBoxContainer inside it.

And then put the Label and DialogueLabel inside the VBoxContainer.

  • TheatreStage, Label, and DialogueLabel

Adjust the size and position of the PanelContainer to your liking.

And lastly, make sure that fit_content is set to true on DialogueLabel.

  • TheatreStage, Label, and DialogueLabel

Script

Attach a script to the scene's root.

extends Control

Create a variable with @export annotation to reference the TheatreStage node that was made previously. In this example, we'll name the variable 'my_stage'.

extends Control

@export var my_stage: TheatreStage

Click the scene's root node, go to the inspector, and assign the TheatreStage node to my_stage.

Click the TheatreStage node, and head over to the inspector dock. Reference the Label and DialogueLabel node that were made before.

  • Label and DialogueLabel node assigned on the TheatreStage inspector

More on configuring Stage here.

Controlling the Stage

Starting

Create another variable to store the Dialogue, we'll name it 'epic_dialogue'. Use Dialogue.load() and pass the path of the written dialogue file.

extends Control

var epic_dialogue = Dialogue.load('res://intro.dlg')

@export var my_stage: TheatreStage

Call start() method on my_stage, and pass the epic_dialogue as the argument to start it.

extends Control

var epic_dialogue = Dialogue.load('res://intro.dlg')

@export var my_stage: TheatreStage

func _ready():
    my_stage.start(epic_dialogue)

Now, the dialogue will start when you play the scene. But we're not done here yet!

Progressing

Progress the dialogue with TheatreStage.progress(). In this example, we'll use _input(event) with Godot's default action key 'ui_accept' (space/enter key).

extends Control

var epic_dialogue = Dialogue.load('res://intro.dlg')

@export var my_stage: TheatreStage

func _ready():
    my_stage.start(epic_dialogue)

func _input(event):
    if event.is_action_pressed('ui_accept'):
        my_stage.progress()

Now, everytime 'ui_accept' key is pressed, the dialogue should progress.

Summary

And, thats it!

Here is how the scene and script should looks like:

MyScene
  ├─ TheatreStage
  └─ PanelContainer
        └─ VBoxContainer
            ├─ Label
            └─ DialogueLabel

extends Control

var epic_dialogue = Dialogue.load('res://intro.dlg')

@export var my_stage: TheatreStage

func _ready():
    my_stage.start(epic_dialogue)

func _input(event):
    if event.is_action_pressed('ui_accept'):
        my_stage.progress()

There's also Minimal Theatre Setup tutorial which is very similar to this article, but a lot more shorter and straightforward.

Next step

Specific tutorials