Hi all!

As part of campaigning for votes for the Playdate Community Awards 2023, I was asked if I'd ever done a write-up for the conversation and map features for Life's 2 Short: Unhooked. I have not! And I will now...

Conversations

First thing's first, we have a variable that determines if a character is currently speaking. If this variable is 0 then no-one is speaking, if it is not 0 then it is the name of a character who is speaking and so we draw the portrait tiles! (So at the start of each conversation you change the character variable to the name of the character and at the end of each conversation you change it back to 0).

Each character portrait is named by tile in order e.g. "Captain 1" to "Captain 36" from top left to bottom right and so changing the Character variable to a name calls the drawing of that character's portrait. Fairly simple?

Next up, when interacting with any character, you have a menu system that has conversation, items & Oscar clue. Depending on who you've met or which items you have, certain options will become available in sub-menus for each of these choices. Once I had completed one character's conversation, item, clue code then I copied and pasted it to all other characters and inserted their particular responses to each topic. You then build out the story by speaking to the right characters about the right items or topics and everything is saved in variables so you can develop a save system (There are well over 100 variables in the game...)

It's quite simple really but just involved a lot of writing, matching each character to each item and conversation and writing a little clue for each of their particular needs. Here's my messy script Excel (I used something similar for Time From Earth). 

So there you have it for the conversation system! It's fairly simple in drawing the character portrait at the start of each conversation and then having an option based conversation system. It sounds obvious but most of the work really comes in drawing 18 portraits and writing 300 lines of dialogue...).

Map system

I did a little video of this a while ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/PlaydateDeveloper/comments/140lxvq/lifes_2_short_unhook... but essentially I wanted to ensure that the game wasn't bogged down with tedious walking back and forth as there is a lot of backtracking. So the map system makes things much faster! Let's break it down...

First you have an item in your inventory that is a map. Simple enough! Then on using the map, the player is transported to a new room and made invisible. 

Here's where it gets very manual and convoluted...The player is surrounded by tiles that increment vertical and horizon map variables as you walk in to them, this effectively give coordinates. These coordinates signal to certain tiles on the map to flash and give the impression that a location on the map is selected. Then on confirming, the player is made uninvisible and transported to that location from the map! (But only if the player has already visited that room and has gained the variable to say so).

I am SURE there are probably flashier ways to do this but OH MY WORD I was proud of making this work in Pulp. Sometimes you get an idea and your brain power can carry you to the very edge of making it work, you put the work in and...IT ACTUALLY WORKS!

So that's how the map and dialogue systems work in Life's 2 Short: Unhooked. I'm immensely proud of what I have achieved in this game using the limitations of Pulp and whilst I still argue that most of the work comes in the script and the visuals, I think I managed to achieve some very cool steps forward in this game (It's a million miles away from what's achieved in the original Life's Too Short!)

If anything doesn't make sense then feel free to chat in the comments!

Thanks for reading,

Ollie