Pulp has a lot a great little features like the spotlight or tile sampling dropper.
But as I'm working it's clear there's much more that could be done.
To make sure I'm capturing them, I'm going to make a list as I work.
~~ Better tile management ~~
I have so many tiles that on my 1440p screen, when I scroll down to pick a tile, I can no longer see the editor. I can't imagine what it's like on a laptop.
If we could have pages of for tiles, that would allow me to split up my walls, floors, roofs, outdoor tiles, UI elements and card screen art.
~~ Having a mode switcher to rearrange tiles ~~
It's not uncommon for me to pick a tile, work in the room, then return to the tile picker and see things have shifted around and I have no idea how to put it back. My best option is to then undo until it looks right again. Loosing my work. If there was some way to lock and unlock it. That would be helpful.
~~ Better arrow controls in Room screen ~~
When I want to flick though tiles to change the settings on them (adding a lot of frames or making things solid) The cursor can be controlled left and right on the tile area but up and down change room. Not sure when I would want to change rooms with the arrow keys.
~~ Drawing lines ~~
It would be nice if the pencil tool let you click and drag to draw lines. Or if there was a line tool.
~~ Resize the script window on sprites and items ~~
~~ Place more than 1 tile at once ~~
~~ Selecting many tiles to drag ~~
In this room, I want to move the top ridge and the house on the left left up but not the houses on the right.
~~ Copy and Paste selected tiles ~~
Lets go crazy!
~~ Allow you to dim or hide exits ~~ with an edge exit, I can't see the tiles underneath which is a pain in the ass.
Someone pointed out that this is already a feature.
~~ Exits outside of the room ~~
Functionally edge exits sit outside the room. When in game, you have to push into the edge to activate them. But they display inside the room. If could be placed outside of the 25x15 room editor then you could allow the user to double click on them to take you to that room. Without fear of placing a tile.
Single exits should also sit outside a room so you can avoid the below issue.
~~ Allow for exits which are bigger than 1 but not an edge tile. ~~
To prevent this sort of thing.
~~ Room arranger ~~
When you start getting a lot of rooms, the drop down box isn't idea for picking a room.
If there was a visual way of arranging them, it would be helpful.
~~ Better sprite importer ~~
When importing a sprite, it's not clear why it fails. Or why it goes to the sprite layer and not the world layer.
Accepting anything and selecting where it goes on import would be ideal.
~~ Turn off "This script cannot be compiled in its current state." warning ~~
I know the code is wrong which is why I want to open the docs or find the area of the code which is right.
Perhaps only show the error when trying to save or play.
~~ Scroll lock player window ~~
This will allow scrolling to just move the crank
~~ Mouse wheel click and drag for scrolling ~~
Not sure if this is posable but would be helpful
I would actually prefer mouse wheel click and drag to be multi-cursor select in the editor, such as how it is handled in IntelliJ. This is currently supported in pulp with option/alt click and drag, but mouse wheel click and drag is slightly easier.
~~Better used of desktop screen space ~~
When building on the desktop, you could have a two panel view where you could scroll the tiles on the right but keep the room in view on the left.
I would love to see better tile management. It's very difficult to work with tiles when you have so many of them and you need to add more once you've already organized them, breaking your structure. And if you want to have large multiple-tile assets it becomes almost impossible to organize without them just turning into an unintelligible strip of tiles.
My three suggestions would be to first and foremost let us arrange tiles without them automatically shifting over to take up the next available space. Tiles should remain in their spot in the grid unless moved manually.
Second, let us use shift/ctrl to select multiple tiles to move. These two alone would solve 90% of the organization issue.
Finally, not as important, but a way to organize tiles into different pages/categories would be great. This way you wouldn't have to scroll down to find tiles lower in the list.
Bump train. Any tile management improvements would be huge, and the multi-select tiles (that are placed in a room) to drag them instead of dragging the whole room would also be amazing
This is minor, but it would be nice to be able to add a version number to a game with Pulp (an entry on the "Game" screen, perhaps?). I've been using a Playdate, and it would be nice to know what version is currently sideloaded (as-is, it always just reads 0.0.0). I can manually edit the pdxinfo file and add a "version =" line, but needing to do that each time get tiresome.
Also, yes, some sort of tile management feature would be amazing. Even just the ability to put them into categories/tabs would speed selection up greatly.
We appreciate all the ideas, folks. We'll be going through this list in the near future to determine which items are feasible and in line with our vision for Pulp. For a general idea of how we're planning on making these decisions, see this post:
Thanks for the suggestions, and for your enthusiasm for Pulp!
