My Pulp game CAT WORLD has a lot of dialogue, so to bring the characters to life I wanted to add a little character portrait to the dialogue boxes. Something a bit like in the GBA game Golden Sun.
With a little help from Neven on Discord, I was able to implement my own version. Here's how it looks:
To achieve this, I'm using the PulpScript draw function.
The character portraits are made out of a 5x5 grid.
The outer tiles are designed to match the dialogue window. They look like this, with names like Top-left, Left, Top-right, and so on.
The inner nine tiles are character-specific. The name format I use is {name}-p-{x}{y}. For example, here's the lumberjack portrait's top-left tile (x=1, y=1).
In terms of scripting, the longest chunk of code takes place in player. It uses PulpScript's while to loop through the x/y coordinates of the inner nine tiles.
// run this on every frame
on draw do
// only draw this if active_speaker is set
if active_speaker!=0 then
// draw the frame, starting at coordinates (3,9)
draw "Top-left" at 3,9
draw "Top" at 4,9
draw "Top" at 5,9
draw "Top" at 6,9
draw "Top-right" at 7,9
draw "Left" at 3,10
draw "Left" at 3,11
draw "Left" at 3,12
draw "Right" at 7,10
draw "Right" at 7,11
draw "Right" at 7,12
draw "Bottom-left" at 3,13
draw "Bottom" at 4,13
draw "Bottom" at 5,13
draw "Bottom" at 6,13
draw "Bottom-right" at 7,13
// draw all nine tiles for the active speaker's portrait
x = 1
while x<=3 do
y = 1
while y<=3 do
// generate dynamic tileId
tileId = "{active_speaker}-p-{x}{y}"
// we want the portrait to draw at coordinates (4,10)
localx = x
localx += 3
localy = y
localy += 9
draw tileId at localx,localy
y += 1
end
x += 1
end
end
end
To display the character portrait, I set the variable active_speaker to the name of a character.
on interact do
active_speaker = "lumberjack"
say "Howdy! Don't see too many other cats around these parts."
end
To hide the portrait box when dialogue ends, we need to set active_speaker back to 0. We could do this manually each time, but it's easier to use the loop event in the game object.
on loop do
// hide dialogue portrait
active_speaker = 0
end
And there you have it! It takes a little bit of PulpScript, but the effect is almost seamless.
(You may need to click on the above GIF to get it to animate.)
