sprich

sprich

The easy to use plaintext dialog format.

Sprich (German: speak) is a tool for game developers to easily manage dialogs for NPCs. It features a nice human readable format for creating the dialogs and compiles them to JSON for you to embed in your game.

Usage

Put all the .sprich files you want to compile in one directory and run:

sprich input_directory

or

sprich input_directory output_directory

Which will compile the files and place the resulting JSON - Files in the output directory, or in the input directory, if no output directory was specified.

Syntax

Each file consists of several states and other statements which are all on their own line. In the following I will describe the intended behaviour for all statements, in your game however you can exploit them as you wish.

Consult the folder examples for a few examples of the syntax in action.

Each state can have several actions followed by several options. If no options are given or no action transitions into a new state the dialog is over.

states

The default start state in sprich is considered to be named [+] and other states can be named by a mix of letters, numbers and underscores.

messages

The simplest action is a message your character should say:

[+]
"Hello!"

options

Once all actions in a state have been processed you can show options to your user. They define a text that should be selectable follow by an optional state and a condition. The option should only be selectable/visible if the condition holds true. If no state is given the option ends the dialog.

Conditions are always strings that your game needs to process.

[+]
"Hello! How are you?"
> "Good" [good]
> "Bad" [bad] "mood == 0"
> "I don't want to talk"

function calls

You can call any function with parameters seperated by spaces. A function call is denoted by a \.

[+]
\think
\feel "happy" 3
"Nice to meet you!"

instant transitions

Instants can be used for intermediate states. They start with a -> followed by a state and an optional condition. If no condition is given the instant will be acted out immediately. This can be useful for checking conditions at the start of a dialog.

[+]
-> [grumpy] "weather == bad"
-> [happy]