Hey there,
One of my dream projects is a kind of text game. Is something like this viable in Defold?
I’ve been looking at some of the documentation, and it looks like I can use the GUI text nodes, but I’m a bit unsure of how well this would work with a lot of text (and ideally the UI for the game would have some kind of scrollable textbox type thing).
Personally, I come from GameMaker Studio which has some of the worst text support I’ve ever seen from any game engine.
Thanks!
You mean like Zork and other text adventures/interactive fiction?
Sure, Lua should actually be a pretty good language for this. The Defold text support isn’t super awesome, but it should be enough.
Ah, should’ve clarified. Definitely more of an interactive fiction game (kind of like the Android/iOS game Lifeline or maybe those Choose Your Own Adventure books) with a lot of text scrolling. You wouldn’t be entering any text like Zork though.
Defold doesn’t have any sort of rich text support, so if you want variable formatting within your paragraphs it may be a pain, but probably doable. If you just need plain text then it should be pretty simple. What features are you missing with GameMaker?
The mechanics I think will be pretty easy. There may even be some Lua libraries out there that you could use.
Defold doesn’t supply any functional GUI widgets out of the box (buttons, scrollboxes, etc.), just images, pie/circle nodes, and text, but there are a few GUI libraries on the asset portal if you don’t want to do those things yourself (which isn’t that hard either). There’s a little tag filter button next to the “add your asset” button if you want to simplify your search.