Add a character

Characters are the people in your story — the ones who speak in dialogues, get handed quests, and show up in your game's world. This walkthrough adds one NPC, gives it the details the rest of the app will use, and puts a portrait on it.

Everything here uses images that ship with Narratyr, so there is nothing to install or sign up for.

Follow along: download the project this walkthrough starts from. The zip holds two projects — add_character, which is where the walkthrough begins, and add_character_final, which is where it ends up if you want to compare.

Open the Characters & Items view

Everything in your project that is a thing — a person, an item, a prop — lives in the Characters & Items view. Click its icon in the left sidebar, or press ⌥1.

The left panel is your project's tree of folders and entities. The right panel shows whatever you have selected there.

Pick the folder to add to

Folders are yours to organise however you like — this project keeps its NPCs in characters/npcs. Click that folder to select it.

Selecting a folder first means your new character lands in it. The panel on the right confirms the folder's full path and how many entities are already in it.

Add the character

Click Add in the toolbar and choose Character from the menu.

The menu lists every entity type your project defines. The types at the top — Character, Item, Performance — are the primary ones you'll reach for most; the greyed-out entries below are supporting types used by quests and graphs.

A new character appears in the tree, selected and ready to edit.

Two fields matter before anything else:

• Name is what you'll see everywhere in the editor. It can be anything, and it has to be unique within the project.
• External ID is how your game's code refers to this character. It must be a valid identifier — letters, digits and underscores, no spaces — and it does not follow the name automatically. Set it deliberately, and treat it as permanent once your game starts using it.

The ID between them is assigned by Narratyr and is not editable. It's what links this character to dialogues, quests and other entities behind the scenes, so renaming the character later never breaks those links.

Fill in the character's details

Below Character Properties are the fields this project's Character type defines. Fill in what you know:

• FullName, Gender and Role are ordinary property fields. Gender and Role are backed by enumerations, so they offer a fixed set of choices.
• Bio and Notes are free text. Bio is the description your game reads; Notes are for you.
• Nicknames, Tags and Related are lists — click Add item to append to them.

None of it is required, but the more you fill in, the more the rest of the app has to work with.

Import a portrait

A character's profile image has to be in your project before you can pick it, so start in the Assets view — ⌥9, or the picture icon in the sidebar. Click Add, then Stock Image….

Narratyr ships with a small library of character art. Tick the one you want — this walkthrough uses avatars/female-2.png — and click Import.

You can tick several at once if you're setting up a cast in one go. Imported images are copied into your project, so they travel with it.

Set it as the profile image

Go back to Characters & Items and select your character. The slot above the Name field lists every image in the project — pick the one you just imported.

The portrait appears above the slot, and next to the character's name in the tree.

To swap it later, pick a different image from the same slot; to remove it, clear the slot.

Save

Adding a character changes your project but doesn't write it to disk. Press ⌘S when you're happy with it — the * next to the project name in the title bar tells you there's unsaved work.