Your First NPC

Let’s get Mira talking. Paste this into mira.bub:

title: Start
---
Mira: Hello, traveller. Potions? I've got potions.
Mira: Best prices in the harbour district. Probably.
-> How much for a health potion?
    Mira: Five gold. Non-negotiable.
-> Just looking.
    Mira: You've been just looking for ten minutes.
===

Run it:

cargo run -p bubbles-tui -- mira.bub

Pick an option. Notice what happens: both branches lead to a line from Mira, then the dialogue ends. Not much of a sales pitch yet, but it works.

What’s in here

The node. Everything between title: Start, the --- separator, and the closing === is one node. Nodes are the chunks your game jumps between. This one is called Start, which is the default entry point.

Speaker lines. Mira: ... is a speaker line. The name before the colon becomes the speaker field in DialogueEvent::Line. Lines with no name are narrator lines - speaker arrives as None.

Options. Lines starting with -> are choices. When the runner hits a set of them, it emits DialogueEvent::Options(...) and waits. Your game shows the choices, the player picks one, you call runner.select_option(i), and execution continues into that option’s indented body.

DialogueEvent::Options(opts) => {
    // opts[0].text = "How much for a health potion?"
    // opts[1].text = "Just looking."
    runner.select_option(player_choice)?;
}

Fall-through. After both option bodies finish, there’s nothing else in the node - so the dialogue ends. That’s fine for now.

Try it

Change Mira’s greeting to something grumpier. Press r in the TUI to reload. The change shows up immediately.

Add a third option. Reload again. The new choice appears in the options list.

Try putting some lines after the options block (outside the indented bodies, back at zero indent). Those lines run after whichever option the player picks.

===          <- add something before this
===

Something like:

Mira: Anyway. Come back if you change your mind.
===

That line runs no matter which option was chosen. Handy for “and then we get back to business” beats.

Where this is going

The dialogue works, but Mira doesn’t care whether you can actually pay. Let’s add gold.

Next: Add State