Builder Guide
1 - Basics
2 - Chapter Editor
3 - Actor Editor
4 - Interactions
5 - Flags and Conditionals
6 - Graphics
Now let's work on building something that's actually worth saving!
Part 2 - The Chapter Editor
First, let's talk a little bit about what a Chapter means in a Project PD game. If you want to go right to the bits with a bit more utility, feel free to skip ahead a bit.
In Project PD, Chapters are the most high-level element there is. Most of the rest of the content you're going to be creating is part of a Chapter, just like in a book. Areas, Actors, and a few other things all live in one Chapter or another.
Unlike a book, a Chapters don't have to go in any particular order (but it can be helpful to think of them that way). A Chapter is just a way to organize your game into workable chunks. But if you want to, you can have your players move back and forth between Chapters. There's no restrictions there.
If you're more familiar with other interactive fiction or visual novel creation tools, you might want to think of a Chapter as an area, and a Project PD Area as a room. You can definitely use both elements as such with no real difficulties, the naming is just to keep things as abstract as possible so as not to limit anyone's creativity.
However, there is one rule you should remember: whenever a player starts a Chapter, they will be placed in the first Area in that Chapter. Similarly, when a player starts a new game, they will be placed in the first Chapter. So your first Chapter (at the top of the Chapter List) will be your starting Chapter, and the first Area in that Chapter will be the starting Area.
Ok, let's get down to business!
2a - Chapter Naming
Here's an empty Chapter Editor. If you read the first part of this tutorial (1-Basics) this will look familiar:
Let's rename our Chapter to something a little more descriptive (just click the name editor element to change the Chapter's title, it will start with "Untitled Chapter" displaying):
Click "Set" to save the change.
Done! You'll notice the name display has changed, as well as the title bar. If you check your Chapter List, the name has also updated there.
Next let's do some work with areas.
2b - Area List
The Area List is the empty space on the left of the Chapter Editor. Since we currently don't have any areas, there isn't anything to display. Let's do something about that!
Click the "+" button to add an Area:
Now you have an area in your list, titled "New Area."
If you want to delete your Area, you can always just click the "X" next to its name in the Area List. Areas can also be reorganized simply by dragging and dropping them in the list. Remember, the first Area in the list will be the one that the player gets put in when they start this Chapter, so make sure your starting Area is at the top!
Let's check out what we can do with our new area.
2c - Area Editor
To edit an area, just select it from the Area List. You'll notice there is no "E" (edit) button in the Area List (unlike some other element lists). This is to speed your working progress, since it helps to be able to switch quickly back and forth between areas within the same window.
Let's take a look at the Area Editor itself:
First, you'll probably want to change the Area's name to something a little more descriptive. The Area name editor, works exactly the same way as the Chapter name editor. Just click the Area's title:
Change "New Area" to whatever you want, then click "Set." You'll notice the title, as well as the Area List will both update to reflect your new setting.
Now let's get into what makes an Area.
2d - Area Descriptions
When a player enters an area, we need to tell them where there are, what they see, and give them some context. Since Project PD is text-based, we're going to do that using text. This is an Area Description.
Here's the Area Description list:
As you can see, we haven't added any descriptions yet. Let's add one. Just like with Areas (and everything else), just click the "+" to add a new Area Description.
Now we've got a single Area Description, with the somewhat unhelpful text of "Default description."
Obviously we're going to want to change that. Let's edit the Area Description by clicking the "E" button.
This is the Area Description editor. Let's go through each element and see what it does.
First, you'll notice the Tag field at the top. In Project PD, a Tag is a piece of text that you can use in the editor to describe an element. It's just like a nickname for something. Tags are never shown to the player. So you can safely name your tags however you want without worrying about how it looks. A Tag is just for your own reference.
We're going to make this description show when the player first starts the game. To remind ourselves of that, let's change the Tag to "start_intro":
Now we'll know what this description is for later. Note that you can use whatever naming convention you want for tags. We could have just as easily tagged this description "startIntro", "START INTRO", "Start Intro", or even "1a". Whatever makes sense to you as the builder.
Next up is the Conditional in the top right. We're going to skip over Conditionals for now, because we're focusing on the Area Editor and I don't want to get sidetracked. If you want to learn about Conditionals, check out the Flags and Conditionals section.
In the middle of the editor is a large text box for the meat of the Area Description, the description part. Here you write what you want the player to read when he or she enters this area and sees this particular description.
You'll notice description text can span multiple lines. Your descriptions can be quite long, so don't worry too much about space. Be descriptive!
Finally, at the bottom left is a checkbox marked "Repeating." This checkbox controls whether or not you want this description to be shown once or every time the player enters the room. When "Repeating" is checked, this description will fire every time. Since we want this particular description to be shown only as an introduction, we're going to uncheck "Repeating":
Now this description will only be shown once.
But what's going to show the next time the player enters this room? To solve this issue, we'll add a second description. First, save this one by clicking "Set".
Your text is going to be cut off in the editor display if it's more than a couple lines to save space, but don't worry, it's still there. The Project PD Player will display it fine.
Let's add a second description. This one will be shown every time after the "start_intro" description is shown.
The second description pops up under the first. Notice you can have as many editors open as once, which allows you to copy and swap text between descriptions as necessary.
Remember to set this Area Description to Repeating, so it will be shown every time the player enters this area (as long as "start_intro" has already been shown).
That's it for Area Descriptions! Remember that in the Area Description list order matters. The Project PD Player will start at the top of the list, and find the description that is displayable. So if you have a repeating description with no conditions at the top of the list, none of the descriptions under it will ever be shown. Make sure every Area Description except the very bottom one either has a Conditional or is non-repeating. If this doesn't make sense yet, it will hopefully clear up once we start working with Conditionals later on.
Next, we'll learn how to let the player move from one Area to another.
2c - Area Transitions
Since we're going to want more than a single Area for our game, we're going to need a way to pass between them. One way to allow this is Area Transitions. An Area Transition is a lot like a link (or door) between two areas.
Since we're going to need another Area if we want to move back and forth, let's go ahead and add a second one.
I've added a second area called "Main Room." We're going to let the player move back and forth between our "Starting Area" and "Main Room."
To do so, let's go back to our Starting Area and add an Area Transition.
We've instantiated a new Area Transition, and it's set with all it's default values. Let's change them.
This, as you can probably guess, is the Transition editor.
The Transition editor is pretty simple. At the top is a drop-down list that allows you to select the Area that you want the Transition to take the player to. Since we want this Transition to go to the Main Room, we're going to select that.
Next let's change our transition description. The transition description is the text that the player will see when playing your game that lets them know what this Transition does.
We're going to skip over the Conditional again, since we don't want to get into that yet, but there's one last piece of a Transition: the direction arrow.
The direction arrow allows you to give your players something to navigate by. This makes it easy for players to navigate more quickly and keep their spatial awareness.
To change the direction, simply click and drag the direction arrow to the desired orientation.
You'll notice the direction arrow snaps into the cardinal directions (increments of 45 degrees), so you don't have to worry about getting it exactly right.
That's it for this Area Transition. But since we want the player to be able to go back and forth between rooms, we still need to add an Area Transition in the Main Room back to our Starting Room.
There! Now the player will be able to travel back and forth between our two areas whenever they want.
Remember, the Area Transition list is not like the Area Description list. Each Area Transition (that doesn't have a Conditional) will always display. The only different the order of the Area Transition list makes is the order that they are displayed on the screen for the player.
Now let's learn about putting things in our areas that the player can interact with.
2d - Actors
In Project PD, an Actor is anything that the player can interact with directly. An Actor can be a person or creature, but it can just as easily be a desk, a piece of paper on the ground, a control panel, or even a wall. In simple terms, an Actor is just something that we can attach an Interaction to.
We'll get to Interactions soon, but first let's add an Actor to our Area.
Pretty simple, right? However, the topic of editing an Actor is a little too complicated to stuff in this tutorial (it's already getting pretty long).
To learn about editing Actors, head on over to the next part of this guide: Part 3 - The Actor Editor.
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