Test Conversations
How to use the chat preview panel to test your NPC before publishing — and what to look for when things go wrong.
Chat preview panel
The editor includes a built-in chat panel that lets you talk to your NPC without saving or publishing. Open the Preview panel from the editor toolbar to start a conversation against your current draft. Changes you make to states, transitions, or prompts are reflected immediately — no need to save first.
What to test
Focus your testing on four areas:
- Character consistency — Does the NPC stay in character across multiple turns? Try asking off-topic questions and see if the persona holds.
- State transitions — Do transitions fire at the right moment? Walk through each path in your state machine and confirm the NPC moves to the correct state.
- Scoring — If your scenario uses scoring, verify that points accumulate correctly and that win/lose conditions trigger when expected.
- Edge cases — Send empty messages, very long messages, repeated inputs, and nonsense. A well-built NPC should handle these gracefully without breaking character or getting stuck.
Common failure modes
These are the issues that come up most often during testing:
- Character breaks — The NPC drops its persona and responds as a generic AI. Usually caused by a weak identity prompt or a state system prompt that contradicts the persona.
- Wrong transition timing — The NPC moves to the next state too early or too late. Tighten the transition condition to be more specific about what the player needs to say or do.
- Dead-end states — The conversation reaches a state with no outgoing transitions and no terminal flag. Check the diagram for orphaned nodes.
- Too permissive or too strict conditions — Transitions that fire on almost anything, or transitions that never fire at all. Adjust the condition language and test again.
💡Try adversarial inputs
The best way to find weak spots is to actively try to break your NPC. Attempt to make the character contradict itself, reveal information it shouldn't know, or skip ahead in the scenario. If you can break it, a player will too.
Testing tips
- Test every path — Don't just test the happy path. Walk through every branch in your state machine, including lose conditions and edge-case transitions.
- Check scoring totals — If your scenario awards points, manually add up the scores at the end and compare them to what the engine reports. Mismatches usually mean a transition condition is awarding points you didn't intend.
- Reset and replay — Start fresh conversations frequently. State from a previous test can make it hard to tell whether a fix actually worked.