Accessilogue - The Modular and Accessible Dialogue System

A new and innovative tool from Sunscorched Studios, that will transform how your team does dialogue.

With Accessilogue integrated into your workflow, there will be no more hand editing lines in-editor, taking up your technical team members' valuable time. Instead writers, designers and other staff can simply edit an external spreadsheet or export one from their writing or planning tool of choice. Import that sheet into Unreal and you are done.

You need to change the audio files to match your new subtitles? Easy! Just record and process the audio files as you usually would and re-import them. No setting up sound cues for every asset. They will automatically be matched to the subtitles in the tables by name.

Want to localise to a bunch of languages? Accessilogue has you covered: Just load in a different set of data tables based on language settings. It will select the localised audio files on its own.

But what about the part of your team, that does work in engine? What do they get to play with? For them the data driven nature of Accessilogue makes scripting out dialogue fast and easy. Instead of triggering individual lines, dialogue can be scripted in chunks of lines called conversations, which can be accessed simply by mentioning their ID. The same goes for player choices which can be scripted in sets.

Need other characters to interrupt a conversation? Just set the priority for those lines higher and Accessilogue will take care of it on its own - and when supplied with a table for reaction lines - will seamlessly blend in the right ones before and after an interruption to create a natural flow of conversation. You can even queue up as many conversations as you want to by setting a custom queue limit. Changed your mind or a conversation becomes obsolete before it was spoken? Remove it from the queue with a single command.

If you provide multiple takes per line Accessilogue will randomly select one of them automatically, if you are missing a voice line, it will just play the subtitle and give out a warning in the extensive debug log, that is already set up for you.

Assuming you have voice lines, they will play fully spacialised and follow your NPC location. If an NPC is not in the level because they are on a call with your player for example, Accessilogue will automatically switch to a 2d sound as a fallback.

Visually Accessilogue offers an array of options for customising your subtitles and dialogue options to match your game’s style. But those same options also make it easy to offer plenty of accessibility options for your impaired players.

All this has been tested in production and is set up to easily integrate into your existing systems because of its modular nature. All the logic is self contained and can be easily migrated and reused in different projects. It doesn’t even matter if you use middleware or not. By default Accessilogue is set up to entirely work with Unreal’s MetaSounds, but we also provide a step by step guide on how to set it up with FMOD.

We use Accessilogue internally on all our projects, you can expect a steady stream of updates and new features, support on our discord server and via contact form.

Blueprints

• 1 x BP Actor NPC with example project specific children
• 1 x BP Actor for changing settings within a certain volume (example project specific) with children
• 1 x AnimBP for all animations
• 1 x Player Controller
• 1 x HUD and multiple widgets used by it to display subtitles and player choices as well as UI elements
• 1 x Game Mode, 1x FP Character BP, 1 x Game Instance
• 4 x Interfaces for easy communication between the main systems
• 1 x BP function library for shared functionality
• 1 x Sound Attenuation Settings

Data Assets

• 5 x structs for handling the system data
• 10 x example data tables plus externally supplied .csv template
• 4 x input actions and 1x input map

Art & Audio Assets

• 1 x MetaSound Dialogue Source
• .wav audio files for all example dialogue lines listed in the data tables
• a few placeholder animations for showing off functionality in the example project with their respective AnimMontages
• 1 x Showcase example level
• 9 x character portrait textures with their respective material instance
• all necessary UI materials and textures