Pulp Game Jam dev log: Neven & Dave's game

Pulp
4

Pulp has several ways to show dialog: say, label, menu. A specific feature I wanted in our game is an RPG-style avatar of the speaking character.

You can of course embed tiles in text, like so:

say "{embed:person} WITCH: Oh no you don't!"

which would give you something like:

image

This is cute, but I wanted large, expressive avatars—4 or even 9 tiles in size—plus some additional character info. Like so:

image

I could draw all this manually using swaps, but that's a lot of swaps. With 5 characters in the game, I needed a more automated system. Here's what I ended up with.

The game logic sets the currently speaking character:

dialogPerson = 5

Then this [dialog] room draws like such:

on drawDialogAvatar do	
	tell 4,10 to
		swap "p{dialogPerson}t1"
	end
	tell 5,10 to
		swap "p{dialogPerson}t2"
	end
	tell 6,10 to
		swap "p{dialogPerson}t3"
	end
	
	tell 4,11 to
		swap "p{dialogPerson}t4"
	end
	tell 5,11 to
		swap "p{dialogPerson}t5"
	end
	tell 6,11 to
		swap "p{dialogPerson}t6"
	end
	
	tell 4,12 to
		swap "p{dialogPerson}t7"
	end
	tell 5,12 to
		swap "p{dialogPerson}t8"
	end
	tell 6,12 to
		swap "p{dialogPerson}t9"
	end
end

So, 9 draws for 9 tiles. It expects the tiles to be named like p1t3—person 1, tile 3.

When creating these, I make the first tile (p1t1) then hit Duplicate 8 times. Note that this automatically increments the number—Shaun made it so that tiles with numbers at the end up the number when duplicated. Super handy!

Adding a new character is now just a matter of defining them and drawing their 9 tiles. I draw those right on the canvas (to see what I'm doing), then remove them from the canvas before running the game.

P.S. The info is drawn like such:

if dialogPerson==5 then
	label "CHESTER COOKE JR." at 9,10
	label "Assoc. Account Manager" at 9,11
	label "Seeks meaning of life" at 9,12
end

I could also set these 3 lines to variables and have one block that draws them all, but I figured this was good enough, so why add extra variables. If the game needed to use these fields elsewhere, I'd use variables.

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