How do I call up an animation in the dialogue by making it an autoload?

[Harushii18]

I've a new user to godot, it is my first time making a game so I apologise if this is a dumb question.
I have a game level that has a chicken in it, which is a character node 2d and has animations attached to it.
However, I'm not sure how to make these animations autoloads to play in the middle of dialogue, as I would think that I'd need to reference the instance of chicken in my scene but can't make the parent instance script of the chicken an autoload or it might affect all chickens. And adding the script for the instance of chicken as an autoload doesn't seem right to me when I think of autoloading every single animation i do separately like that if there are 50 chickens in 50 different scenes that require animations in all dialogues.

I can't seem to find much on animation managers like this and I assume there's a way to do it by autoloading a single function that takes in the chicken instance, but don't know, and I would love to know what the right way is.
Does anyone have any docs to refer me to or any examples?
It would be highly appreciated!

[Harushii18]

I managed to learn how to do it by using autoloads and a dictionary to store the node names and their related animations. For those who are very fresh beginners to godot like me, I created a ChickenManager autoload script, which can be generalised to an animation manager later:

ChickenManager.gd:

extends Node

var chickens: Dictionary = {}  # Store chickens by name

func register_chicken(name: String, chicken):
	chickens[name] = chicken

func unregister_chicken(name: String):
	if name in chickens:
		chickens.erase(name)

func animate(char_name: String, animation_name: String):
	if char_name in chickens:
		chickens[char_name].play_animation(animation_name)

and added this script to my chicken node

Chicken.gd:

extends StaticBody2D

@export var chicken_name: String = "Chicken1"  # Unique identifier for each chicken

@onready var anim_player = $AnimationPlayer

func _ready():
	ChickenManager.register_chicken(chicken_name, self)

func _exit_tree():
	ChickenManager.unregister_chicken(chicken_name)

func play_animation(animation_name: String):
	if anim_player.has_animation(animation_name):
		anim_player.play(animation_name)

Thereafter you can just add the chicken into your scene, change the chicken_name in the inspector to the chicken name you want and call the animate function from the ChickenManager in your dialogue scene with the associated chicken name

Dialogue file e.g.

~ start
Nathan: [[Hi|Hello|Howdy]], this is some dialogue.
Nathan: Here are some choices.
do animate("Chicken1", "walk")
- First one
	Nathan: You picked the first one.
- Second one
	Nathan: You picked the second one.
Nathan: For more information see the online documentation.
=> END

You can add as many chickens as you want, but only the chicken whose name was passed will do the animation