The day started with polish work on the interaction foundation. When a conversation starts, both the player and the NPC now face each other automatically — no more talking to the back of someone's head. The facing calculation flattens to the horizontal plane so height differences don't cause characters to tilt. A bCancellable flag was added to dialogue data assets so content authors can control per-conversation whether ESC exits the scene — defaults to non-cancellable, which is right for Proclaim's story-driven design. ESC cancel is fully working, routed through NativeOnKeyDown on the dialogue widget since FInputModeUIOnly bypasses the player controller's input bindings entirely. An initial design pass on the dialogue box UI also landed — cleaned up layout, better framing, replaces the functional placeholder.

The condition and effect hookup followed. Dialogue responses have been filtering by narrative conditions since the runtime was built, but nodes had no way to gate their own entry — that gap is now closed. Every node can carry entry conditions, and if they fail when the conversation tries to navigate there, the dialogue ends cleanly. On the effect side, the missing piece was conversation-level completion effects: there was no way to stamp "this conversation happened" on the narrative state when a whole conversation finished. That's now handled through OnCompleteEffects on the data asset. A verbose debug helper was also added — one console command enables per-condition failure logging that shows exactly what was checked and what value it found.

The first real dialogue then went in. The Sarah mission prep scene — set in the temporary safehouse before Ethan's first supply run — is complete as a script and being entered into the engine. It covers the moment when Sarah confronts Ethan about whether he's planning like a husband and father, not just like the person who knows how to solve the technical problem. Four opening responses branch into four distinct Sarah reactions, then converge into a second choice point about how Ethan handles the planning — bringing Sarah in fully, assigning her the home anchor role, stopping to pray together, or shutting her out. All four paths share the same closing sequence. 61 nodes total. A reusable dialogue script template was also created in the vault as the authoring standard going forward.