Introduction to the scoreboard, slideshow, and dialogue series

The following three series are part of the same project. They’ll help you build the necessary foundations to code a dialogue system.

By the end, you will code the foundations of a branching dialogue system, as seen in visual novels and Japanese role-playing games.

In the first project, you’ll create a scoreboard listing users’ names and high scores.

You’ll then code a “game introduction slideshow.” It’s a series of illustrations accompanied by text the player can flip through. You would use the same code for a linear dialogue system.

And finally, you’ll get to add choices and branches to the display in the branching dialogue series.

Through these three projects, you will learn how to:

• Create user interfaces in Godot.
• Get text or buttons input from the player.
• Dynamically create nodes with GDScript code.
• Load and instance scenes with code.
• Use dictionaries to create branching data structures.

And more. You’ll get to use arrays, dictionaries, signals, and onready variables. This will build upon what you have learned so far.

We chose to have you create user interfaces for this project because they’re the most accessible way we found to teach you that.

The scoreboard is a steppingstone for the slideshow, which is a steppingstone for the branching dialogue system.

For the first time, practices will stray away from the lessons. You’ll reuse what you’ll learn here to create a to-do list, a party member’s status display, etc.

With that, let’s get started with our scoreboard.

Locating the Lesson Files

To get started, open the project “Learn to Code with Godot: Practices” in Godot and, in the FileSystem dock, expand the Scoreboard directory. There is no scene to open, we will create the scene together! See you in the tutorial!