Tuesday, April 30, 2013

RPG Textboxes with "chunking" and options menus


Work continues on the "How to Make an RPG" book. I've added textbox code that will take an arbitrarily sized piece of text and break it down into multiple textbox sized pieces. I'm calling this process "chunking" for want of a better term. You can see an example below.


It's important that this is done automatically because typing out dialog should be as free and frictionless as possible, you shoudn't have to worry if it will all fit in a certain sized box.

The text doesn't appear like a type writer which is common to a lot of RPG games. I think I am going to add this effect, I'm just getting to be a little sick of textboxes currently, so I'm moving on :D

I've also added selection menus to text boxes,  now your hero can be presented with difficult decisions!

The selection can be added to a fixed sized textbox


Or a textbox fitted around the dimension of the text and menu


The font I'm using is the engine's debug font which happens to be monospace and a little pixely. These boxes work with any truetype font. For future updates I might switch to something a little nicer.

I'm looking to move on to and finish ProgressBars today (those pieces of UI used to show progress towards a next level, or current amount of HP/MP). Then I'll be wrapping up the UI widgets for now. I think I'll be moving on to a basic player / inventory menu system, then a small game to end this section of the book.

If this post has caught your interest and you'd like to know more about the book I'm writing please check out the promo site here. Learn how to write a JRPG style game such as Final Fantasy 6.

Edit: ProgressBars

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