Dialogue, text effects and voices

Lines, thoughts, shouts and narration, effects like shaking words, the dialogue box and spoken voices.

Kinds of lines

Says — normal speech. The speaker and listener turn to each other.
Thinks — italic, a little faded, “Name …” on the name plate; nobody turns and the mouth doesn't move.
Shouts — bigger, bold, with a jolt and louder typing.
Narration — a separate beat: centred text with no name plate, for the storyteller.

Text effects

Select words in a line and press an effect button, or type the tags yourself:

{shake}…{/shake} trembling letters; {wave}…{/wave} letters bobbing in a wave.
{color=red}…{/color} coloured words (red, orange, gold, green, blue, purple, pink, gray or a #rrggbb colour); {big}…{/big} larger letters.
{pause} or {pause=1.5} a beat before the next letters; {slow}…{/slow} and {fast}…{/fast} change the typing speed.

Tip Effects play in the Studio, in videos and in Godot and Unity exports. Subtitles and spoken voices ignore them.

The dialogue box

Without your own box art a clean built-in box is drawn. With yours, set the text area, font (four pixel fonts are included), size, colour, name plate and portrait placement in Look & feel → Dialogue box and Portrait. Typing speed and reading time are under Typing.

Speech bubbles

Look & feel → Dialogue box → Lines appear in → Speech bubbles shows each line in a comic bubble above the speaker, with a cloud tail for thoughts and a spiky edge for shouts. A single line can use the other style: Shown in, in its beat. Narration, and lines from someone off screen, stay in the box.

Two portraits

Look & feel → Portrait → Two portraits puts the person being spoken to on the other side, dimmed, visual-novel style. Each character keeps their side for the whole scene, and the text moves clear of both.

Spoken voices

Under Spoken voices in the Direct tab you can generate a text-to-speech voice for every line; choose each character's voice in the Cast panel. You can also import your own recorded line and pick it as the line's Recorded voice. Lines without a voice keep the typing blips.

Lip-sync: with a voice clip, the character's mouth follows the recording — open on the sounds, closed in the pauses. It uses the portrait's talking frames and the character's mouth rows (closed, small, o, wide). Older clips are measured automatically the next time you open the scene.

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