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January 21, 2026 · Narrative · Player · Tools

A dialogue system, and two kinds of health

Characters can talk now — plus a Physical and a Mental health bar, the two things the player has to protect.

Walking into a dialogue trigger (the Doctor) and the new pair of health bars.

Dialogue

Added a dialogue system made of three parts: a sequence (the lines), a system (the UI) and a manager (who’s speaking, and when).

Adding a new conversation is now a repeatable recipe:

1. Drag a dialogue trigger into the scene.
2. Create a dialogue sequence asset (under projectDearZ/dialogue sequence).
3. Assign the sequence to the trigger.
4. Register it with the dialogue manager.

The dialogue UI itself lives in the dialogue system, so styling it later is a one-place change. The first speaker is, fittingly, the Doctor.

Health × 2

The player now has two health bars. In the game they’ll be Physical (pink) and Mental (baby blue) — some things hurt the body, some things hurt the mind, and you’ll have to look after both.

Workflow note

A small lesson from working with Cursor + Claude: don’t @-mention the whole Scripts folder when asking for help. It burns far more context than mentioning nothing at all and letting the assistant search.