Reading the Pulp Docs

#gamedev #beginners #playdate #pulp

Up to this point

I have the Pulp editor using the example game
And two other games
I have downloaded one PDX
I have tweaked a few small things in a few views

Time to fill in knowledge gaps

I shall open the Pulp Docs.

And I shall learn all there is to know - generally speaking - about Pulp!

What I'm learning

Quick Overview

Sprites, Items and Exits are the only Layers that can have Behaviors
The player can 'bump' into a Sprite and 'walk over' an Item - those verbs are important distinctions
What I've been calling views are actually modes
The half-width font is meant for games with lots of text
Each room is composed of tiles - I kind of knew that, but it's great to get confirmation that that is all a room contains
There are four tile types: Player, Item, Sprite, World
There is only one Player in the game
Sprites are any interactive thing
Sprites are always solid
That means the player can't pass through them
Items are something the player can collect
Items are never solid
Items disappear when collected
The tile that was the Item is replaced by the tile chosen as the background color of the game
World tiles can be solid or not solid
All tiles can have multiple frames for simple animation - good to know there's no tile that can't
The five views in Song are called voices
The interactive keyboard is called a piano roll interface
A song can start looping at game start, room enter or game end
Sound is like Song, but pertains to Sprites and Items instead of rooms or game state
100-step undo/redo! Nice!

Modes

I can write a custom collect function if I want to do more than replace an Item tile with a background-color tile when an Item is collected
Only one font per game
Solid tiles are easily identifiable with a red overlay
The blue overlay shows how a room will be cropped to display as the title card
There are several modifier keys that make manipulating one or more tiles very easy
I can change the layer to which a tile resides, with a few exceptions
World tiles can't be scripted to do or say anything
The default behavior when a player overlaps an item is very cool: tile replaced, variable auto-incremented
Of course, defining a custom collect function renders those default behaviors null and void
Tile frames that are part of an animation can be specified via scripting
The room that the player starts in is the starting room - the explains why the star-like icon appears next to only one room in the list of rooms
Creating more tile in the Player layer allows for different player appearance and animations
All Player behavior is attached to the first player tile, and selecting new tiles for the player merely changes the player's appearance - never affecting behavior
Single-tile exit connections are one-way
Exits can be covered by Sprites as a way of enabling a key-unlocks-door gameplay mechanic
Something about placing related exists next to one another instead of on top of one another
The second exit type - connecting room edges - is called an Edge Exit
Edge Exits don't have to be placed on the literal edge of a room
That's cool for games that want to have square rooms (with a HUD filling the extra space
Musical typing seems like it will be a lot of fun: play piano on my keyboard!
Oh, the voices are different sound frequencies
Each voice has different: characteristics, octave ranges, durations. Wow. I'm excited to play with sounds...some day!
Envelopes are a thing - how a note changes over time
Envelopes are a very complicated thing
Songs have parts: intro, repeating body
Songs have 32 bars while sounds have 4
Songs can have all five voices playing simultaneously while sounds can have only one voice playing at a time
The editor is wonderfully robust to allow rich song/sound editing
Notes are compared to pixels in that they are the atomic level of a Sound or Song, and richly editable
The Script editor should feel like Visual Studio Code for writing PulpScript: all of the perks when writing code in a dedicated development environment
Code is validated as it is typed and only saved when it can be successfully compiled
Errors appear below the editor to aid in troubleshooting

Etc.

Most editor actions (the seemingly most common ones) have a keyboard shortcut - many of whom leverage a modifier key
There are several options for getting assets into and out of Pulp

Knowledge gaps: filled!

I'm glad I read these after spending a lot of time in the editor, because it added a lot of clarity instead of overwhelming me
Although, Song and Sound seem pretty complex

Next, on to the other - far more technical - Doc: PulpScript!