I'm trying to make a basic treasure chest as referenced in the first paragraph of Making The Chest (lid = NPC that disappears after activation; empty chest = maptile that is unaffected). I realized that using this technique for objects that change states would require me to draft art beforehand (on paper or in another program) to make sure it looks right when the parts are assembled, since the walkabout and maptile editors can't be open simultaneously. I suspect there must be a way to draw once in-editor, rather than drawing the item 3 separate times.
1. Is there a way to copy/paste back & forth between the maptile and walkabout editors, so I can simply draw one chest and then remove unnecessary pixels from 2 copies of it as needed?
2. Is there a better method for making treasure chests?
3. If I want to give the player multiple items, do I have to use a chain of text boxes? If I want the player to find 3 rocks and 1 rubber duck, do I have to make them read "You found a rock!" "You found a second rock!" "You found yet another rock!" "You also found a rubber duck!" ?
1. AFAIK you cannot copy/paste between the tilemapper and sprite drawing.
2.
- You could have 1 NPC representing the box, appearing via conditional tag, and another for the empty box, appearing via the opposite conditional tag
- You could make a fixed NPC with one direction representing the empty box, and have it turn that way via a simple script (or clever/restrictive mapping)
- You could use slices. This would use a script , but it could be quite a simple one.
The advantage to using slices is that you can display text anywhere and in any arrangement, which might make it more useful for, say, an infobox popping up above the hero, or a large/long list of acquired items down the side of the screen. You can also do fancy-ish animations for opening the box, show large images of the item, or an icon rising from the chest (or above the player) and other things, like showing important icons in a HUD to represent key items, or something like that.
3. Hmm. I thought there was a textbox setting that caused a textbox not to be displayed at all. It would be handy to have a setting that causes the textbox to advance automatically after a set amount of time (or instantly) which could then be used for something like this.
If you want to do it with a single textbox, a simple script is probably the way to go.
Last edited by SwordPlay on Mon Aug 21, 2017 2:02 am, edited 3 times in total.
I appreciate the advice, I'll try the conditional NPC approach for now.
I've barely gotten started with scripting and am not comfortable enough with it yet to put more than necessary into LinearQuest, and I've not made it to slices in any of the tutorials yet - I don't really even understand what they are, but they're next on my list after scripting.