Baby steps
- Go to the homepage
- Read the three short blurbs
- Get excited to try this awesomely accessible game-making tool
- Click the Try it button
- Sign in
Start analyzing what I see
Before pressing anything, I feel like I understand all but one small section of the screen's controls.
Among the many views, I'm intrigued by the one labeled Room
.
Do I want to keep clicking around? Or click on the first link under Help & Docs to get a lesson in pulp?
I gotta play around, right?
Playing around
Export
- I pressed
Export
in the left-hand menu - To my surprise, it downloaded a
JSON
file. I know how to read that! - I opened it in my text editor and saw a ton of
1
s and0
s along with key-value pairs - I assume the
1
s and0
s indicate whether certain pixels are black or white
Font
- I pressed
Font
to go to that view - I saw a full character set
- And several icon buttons with helpful tooltips
- Clicking on characters shows them as highlighted and selects that character to edit
- Editing is as simple as toggling a square between white and black
- The character immediately updates in the other two panels
- Seems easy enough to design my own font!
...Playing the game
- I clicked through the other views
-
Room
was a bit intimidating -
Song
andSound
seem fun...when I want to consider that sort of thing -
Script
is the code for the game. There are only three files. One is empty. The other two contain very little code. And it is all very understandable.
- I was curious where I might see these text prompts in the game
- So I clicked
Play
! - And used my arrow keys to control the player, moving around the stage to pick up floppy disks
Back to the Room
- After playing the game, I messed with some controls in the
Script
view - The script for the game had a button that linked to the
Game
view - The script for the computer had a button that linked to the
Room
view
Clicking it brought me to this intimidating view:
Well, intimidating at first.
Wonderfully, it seems this view is very self-describing:
- A stage showcasing the current room - I can edit it directly by drawing
- An area where I can manage
tiles
pertaining to any of severallayers
- these are the objects in the game, it seems - An area where I can edit a tile's artwork and animations
- An area where I can edit a tile's behavior
This is feeling less scary each minute I spend reading labels! Phew!
Adding and deleting/re-painting
- With the
Player
layer selected, I clicked on the stage - It removed the player and placed him at the spot I clicked!
- Cool! Will this happen for other game objects, too?
- With either the
Sprites
orItems
selected, I clicked on the stage - It added the sprite without removing any
- Great, but how do I now remove game objects from the stage?
- There doesn't appear to be any
Delete
button - However, I can replace the contents of any tile with
World
- either black or white - Viola!
Painting
a tile with black or white removes anySprites
that occupied that tile - Strangely, in cases where sprites occupied adjacent tiles, painting one replaced all adjacent tiles with that color
- I better be careful of that in the future
Creating and adding a tile
I wonder how easy it'll be.
- Click the
+
in the Tile section - Give it a name -
bug
in my case - Color in some squares to make the tile have some form
- Click the stage to add an instance of the tile to the room
- For
Behavior
selectSay
and enter some text - Play the game and see what all that just did
That was really easy!
Giving my bugs behavior
Instead of just saying something, I want my bugs to change the game's state.
- When I toggle the Behavior from
Says
toPulpScript
I can enter code - I move to
Script
view for a larger code editor - Thankfully, I now have an
interact
script unique to my bug tile
I wrote this code to simulate the bug eating all the collected floppy disks, then saying so:
on interact do
if disks==4 then
say "I ate all {disks} of your floppy disks."
disks = 0
end
end
Ending this play session
- Pulp is a delight to mess with
- It was a bit intimidating at first, but now feels very familiar and comfortable
- It all feels like painting, really
I want to do a few things next:
- Download the
PDX
file to my Playdate device to see the launch card and play the game for real - Read the Pulp and PulpScript docs to review what I saw and learn how to add more robust behavior sprites and items in the game
May the fun continue!
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