Welcome to Chatty! This page will focus on getting you up to speed on how to use the Chatty Player (the actual program you downloaded), and introduce some of the relevant core concepts.

Controls

Chatty is a visual novel engine, and is fairly light on controls. Almost everything can be done with the mouse. To advance dialogue, select options, and other basic interactions, just point and click with the mouse.

Certain abilities are hidden behind function keys for debugging or just ease of use. These shortcuts are

• F1 - Fast Forward. Causes the game to advance at 10x speed when held down, and skips all dialogue, except for multiple choice prompts
• F5 - Reset Chatty. Reloads the current project and starts from the beginning
• ~ - Toggle Console. The console opens on startup if there’s something wrong with your project. If it’s nothing critical, you can close it with the tilde key. You can open it at any time with this same key.

General Terminology

• Project - The actual ‘game’ being created. Refers to the folder that contains all the assets, custom content, etc
• Script - A file containing dialogue, commands, etc. Make up the bulk of a Chatty project. You can find more info on scripting in Scripting Reference
• Asset - An image, sound effect, json file, etc, defined by the user in a project
• Speaker - A type of asset used to define a character for your project. Speakers are used extensively in scripting
• Player - The program that runs projects, you presumably downloaded from itch.io
• User - The person using the player, most likely you!

Making a Project

To make your own project, edit the contents of the /project directory included with the Chatty executable. This is currently loaded automatically on startup - in the future, Chatty will be able to load multiple projects, but for now this is all there is.

To better understand the project directory, take a look at Project Structure.

Once you’re ready to dive into writing dialogue, check out Scripting Reference to get started.

Distributing Your Project

Currently, the only way to share a Chatty project with others is to either send them the project directory, or screen record Chatty itself with an external program like Screen2Gif or OBS. In the future, Chatty will hopefully be able to export a video file on its own.