• Introduction
• What is a point-and-click Game?
• What is Escoria?
• Requirements
• Basic Concepts in Godot
• Basics Concepts of Escoria
• About this book
• First Quick Game with Escoria
• About the example game
• Our project planning
• How to start your Escoria project
• Create your first scene
• Testing your Game
• Create Actions
• Escoria Fundamentals
• The Items
• Main Scene
• The Esc scripting language
• Inventory
• Verbs & Actions
• Speech Text
• Dialog interface
• Main Player
• What you need to know as an artist
• Artwork Import
• Scene composition
• Animations
• Music and sound effects
• Terrain: Light and Perspective
• What you need to know as a game designer
• Global states and saving
• Structure
• Booleans and conditions
• Instructions and commands
• Dialog trees
• Internationalization
• Audio speech files
• What you need to know as a programmer
• Game menus
• Implementing savegames
• Optimization
• How to publish
• Export your game

Audio speech files

If your game has recorded audio files for the dialogs, they will play automatically when the say command runs. This solution is much more convenient than using the animation method. That one should be kept for little events. Plus, the method we recommend here for audio speech will make it easier to update files and dialogs if necessary, without touching the Godot file.

Globally, we use a SamplePlayer node to play speech files, meaning you can use any of the streamed formats supported (.ogg, .spx, .mpc, .opus). To configure the speech format, use the project setting Application / Speech Suffix(default value is ".spx" even if opus is now considered as better).

If the speech_suffix does not appear in the settings, you can still edit the engine.cfg file manually. It will be in the first section named application:

[application] 
name="Escoria in Daïza" 
main_scene="res://globals/scene_main.tscn" 
save_data="res://globals/save_data.gd" 
tooltip_lang_default="en" 
speech_suffix=".spx

Audio files

Your audio speech files should be inside the directory audio/speech, grouped by language directories. The game will look for the file inside the directory for the current language. For example:

audio/   
 speech/
     en/
       player_speak_1.spx
     fr/
       player_speak_1.spx

This structure shows 2 versions for the same dialog, one in English, one in French. It’s important that the speech files have the same name for a same phrase. This name will be the one we will use in the Esc scenario. You have to make it as simple as possible. More than that, you may have plenty of speech files. Define naming rules to helps you find the speech file you’ll need.

Using the audio speech files

The audio speech files are named after the translation ID of each speech line, with the speech_suffix attached to them. For example the command:

say player player_speak_1:"What do you mean?"

will search for the file player_speak_1.spx (or any other set format). If you want your game to be available in several languages, see the previous Internationalization chapter to learn about string translation IDs.

You can use the skip_dialog setting to automatically advance the dialog when the audio file finishes playing.