A Hat in Time

A Hat in Time

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Making a Conversation - A Hat in Time modding guide
By maple
This guide will walk you through all the steps of making a conversation.
   
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A welcome
Hello! If you have clicked on this guide, you are likely having problems with making conversations. I personally had to get assistance on the discord server to do anything, so for free future access I'm revealing this dark and mysterious art to everyone!

I'll try to keep this guide as easy to follow as possible.
Part 1: Setting up
Once you are in the editor, and have made a map, you can start the preparations. All you will need is a bit of ground to stand on, and an interact point. The interact point is where the prompt will be located. Left click anywhere, and a menu should pop up. From there, you should hover over "Add Actor" and click on "Add Interact Point".
Once you do that, you will see a target circle in the spot you left clicked. That is the interact point. Don't worry, it will be invisible during gameplay.
We will now take a break from the map and go into the asset browser, to make a conversation tree. The conversation tree contains all data about the dialogue.
Click on the "New" button in the bottom left, and another window should pop up.
Give your conversation a name. Then, click on the box next to "Factory". A drop-down menu should appear. Choose "Conversation Tree" from the list. Then, click OK. You should see your new conversation tree in the asset browser.
Part 2: Conversation Tree
Now that we have made the conversation tree, we have been dumped into the package folder. To get back to normal game files you can always click on "HatinTimeGame" in the Package section of the asset editor.
From here, we right click on our new conversation tree, and click "Open in Conversation Editor...".
A new window should open, that will look something like this:
We will begin by adding a simple bit of text. Right click anywhere on the board, and in the newly opened menu click on "Hat_ConversationNode". A pink rectangle should appear. Click on it.
This is what you should see. Click on the empty box next to "Message" and type what you want to be said. You can also adjust the textbox type in the "Conversation Type" option.
Once you're done, look back onto the board. Drag from the red rectangle on the right side of the root block to the red rectangle on the left side of your conversation node.
It should look something like this. Now click on "Hat_ConversationLink" and the line you made should turn green. You have now completed a basic conversation tree! You can close the window now.

If you want to add a little more to the conversation tree and fix that annoying red popup on the side, right click on the conversation tree in the asset browser, then pick "Properties". In the menu that appeared, go to the option "Voice Acting Info" and pick a character.
Part 3: Hooking up the interact point
Now that you're done with all that, click on your interact point to select it, then hover over the "View" section and choose "UnrealKismet" A new window should pop up, similar to the conversation editor from earlier.
Right click and choose "New Event" - "Actor" - "On Interact", then right click on the created block and choose the top option.
Then, right click somewhere else and choose "New Action" - "Messages" - "Conversation", then open the asset editor, click on your conversation to choose it, click on the newly created block and in the properties tab down below click the green arrow next to "Conversation Tree".
Now connect the "Out" of the first block to the "In" of the second block as we did back in the conversation tree.
Finally, (this part is EXTREMELY important right click and choose "New Variable" - "Player" - "Player", then connect the "Players: All" triangle in the conversation block to the newly formed "All Players" circle.
You can now test the conversation in action!
The End
You should now have a basic conversation! Feel free to play around with all the options - there is a lot more to do in here than what I made in this tutorial, including but not limited to open essay boxes, long conversations, camera panning and more!

I really hope that this guide helped you, goodbye!
3 Comments
TrustedIntruder7 22 Nov, 2021 @ 7:15am 
can you please make a tutorial how to do some choice nodes?
Su 16 Jan, 2021 @ 9:41am 
Or you can put the conversation tree in the character's properties!
Amberstar 20 Dec, 2019 @ 3:16pm 
This guide helped me a lot! Thanks!