Discourse

Build your narrative with a beautiful, designer-friendly interface

Discourse is a powerful non-linear dialogue, cutscene and event-management tool for Unity, as used in the 2018 Unity Award winning title, Lyra: The Traitor Lyngrave

Quick-Start Guide
Developer Documentation

Many dialogue tools are clunky, intimidating tools with thousands of options and integrations that make them behemoths to learn or integrate with your game.

Discourse gives you the power of a clean, accessible, unobtrusive interface that lets you get on with making your game, rather than wasting time trying to find buried settings. A powerful node-based state machine imparts a robust, reliable backbone for your dialogues, cutscenes and barks.

Discourse is fit for hobbyists and professionals alike, shipping with all the essential nodes you need to get the stories in your game up and running with no code required.

Seasoned developers can extend the system to their game's exact needs; add custom nodes with just a few lines of code, or make any changes you see fit, with complete access to the runtime C# source code.

Seamlessly integrate subtitled dialogue, camera transitions, animations and your own custom gameplay logic in a clean, uncluttered and dedicated node-based editor.

Discourse is built around an ID system that allows you to iteratively craft your story without worrying about pinning down string references. Your characters are represented through Actors with their own unique ID; by using this in place of their name, you could rename your protagonist the day before you ship, and no references across graphs would need to be updated.

Runtime:
• Branch dialogue on player-selected choices, or from a specific list of conditions.
• Get/Set variables globally or on Actors (Floats, Ints, Flags and Strings).
• Attach custom "Decorator" data to Actors, such as faction or team colour, and operator on this at runtime.
• Save/Load.
• Powerful parsing system allows you to insert variables in-line with text and even calculate math expressions.
• Switch between gendered text with a simple match-case expression.
• In-built "Narrator" actor with dedicated text styling and audio options.
• Add to your list of genders for any races in your world which require non-human genders.
• Switch cameras, play audio layers, animations - all with just a few clicks.
• Switch Actor portraits during dialogue from a per-actor list of images.
• Switch between scenes with a default dip-to-black transition, or use your own transition with a single prefab change.
• Build a character relationship system fit precisely for your own needs by branching on Actor Variables.
• Supports choice selection via keyboard numbers.
• Display locked choices dependent on Conditions.
• Format subtitles with rich text tags. Includes a typewriter mode that reveals text per-character at a preferred speed, without breaking rich-text tags.
• Trigger dialogue on Start, Collisions, or through your own code.
• Fit for 2D, 3D or VR titles. Discourse is written independently of target platforms and can be easily adapted to suit your project.
• Advance dialogue on MouseClick, AudioFinish or through an Input System of your choice.
• Timeline / PlayableDirector support. Play, Pause, Stop, Rebind and Wait for playable directors to execute a PlayableAsset.
• Reference your own components via a clean scene-referencing system, configured per-event, to call methods on your own behaviours.

Example Content
• Ships with 3 professionally designed, clean UI templates that you can use out of the box, or adjust to suit your game.
• Template content is provided with a clean, organised nested prefab structure.
• UI built with TextMeshPro for impeccable text clarity and performance no matter the target platform.
• Swap in your own custom UI with a single prefab change.

Editor:
• Pro and Free skin support.
• Powerful, performant and clean Node-based editor lets you easily see the flow of your story.
• Zoomable, pannable graph designed with 3-button mice AND trackpads in mind.
• Debug your graphs in PlayMode via highlighting that shows the active and past nodes.
• Full Undo support.
• Create a custom toolbar to change which nodes are quickly accessible by default.
• Full localisation support with CSV export/import for easy collaboration with your translator.
• Preview your language translations with a single dropdown change.
• Discourse is built with elegant custom property drawers that you can reuse on your own custom nodes to fit right in with the existing interface.
• Actor-name dropdowns that update immediately after changing an Actor's name, with no references lost.
• Add-Node widget that provides grouping of in-built and custom nodes

Developers:
• Add custom nodes with just a few lines of code.
• Full C# Runtime source provided.
• Integrate your own gameplay logic with very little headache, working with both immediate and yielded states.
• Thoroughly documented API.
• Graphs are dedicated assets, allowing for easy VCS management across teams.

For all questions, inquiries and requests, please contact: [email protected]

Notes:
- Compatible and tested with 2019.4.20f1 - 2020.1
- C# source is provided for the Discourse Runtime only. Whilst Editor source code is not provided, this does not prevent the creation of custom nodes, toolbars or other extensions of the runtime.
- Requires TextMeshPro
- We are unable to test on AoT platforms, however the example project builds with no problems for Android. We are always happy to work with users to correct any platform issues they may encounter.