Playing with pulp

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

See this:

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 1s and 0s along with key-value pairs
• I assume the 1s and 0s 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 and Sound 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 several layers - 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 or Items 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 any Sprites 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 select Say 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 to PulpScript 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

It worked as expected:

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!