Guide

Writer-facing documentation for authoring dialogue with DialogueDown. If you want to write branching dialogue — not modify the compiler — start here.

Start here

• Your first script — a short walkthrough: say a line, add a speaker, branch on a choice, jump between scenes, and talk to your game.

In this section

• Overview — the architecture at a glance, the representations a script passes through (source → compiled model → playbook → runtime), and the current implementation status.
• Command line — installing the ddown CLI, compiling a script, and opening the interactive visualization.
• Script language specification — the complete writer-facing syntax, split across three reference pages:
  • Speakers and lines — who is speaking, styling, tags, and images.
  • Game state — queries that read from your game and commands that tell it to act.
  • Structure and flow — scenes, succession, choices, jumps, conditions, and ending a run.
• Project configuration — the dialogue.toml that configures your project's speakers, the default speaker, and the compilation mode, and how the CLI finds it.
• Error codes — every diagnostic the compiler can report, with what causes it and how to fix it.

Note

DialogueDown is in early development. The language described here is implemented, but the compiler model and runtime behavior may still change as the library matures.