Questions About Faux Desktops/Computer Interfaces

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HedinnWeis

Guest
Hello,

I'm new here. I'm new to the whole gamedev scene actually. I decided to make my account after following some tutorials and learning some very basic top-down shooter stuff and GML on youtube.

I don't know how many of you have played Cibele, Hacknet, Uplink, Emily is Away, etc, but I want to do a very simple version of one of those kinds of games. Basically just a faux computer desktop that the player can interact with to read emails and narrative content.

Is there anything specifically I should know before I attempt this? How would you go about starting something like this?

I think that, ideally, the player sprite would move from one room to a room that represented the computer monitor (the player sprite/movement controls would change here), but I have no clue where to begin.

Again, I am very new to this so the simplest solutions/lowest depth would be the best.

Thank you,

HedinnWeis
 

Ninety

Member
Not sure if you're looking for implementation suggestions or design advice. If it's the former, I suggest some kind of transition to show the change; maybe a screen appearing with a little animation and booting up. I think an instant swap between play styles would be jarring.

On design of faux interfaces: SIMPLIFY. You can't mimic the visual complexity of most standard GUIs, with dozens of folders and lots of tabs open. The player needs to be able to see the key elements without clutter.
 
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HedinnWeis

Guest
Kind of both. I'm looking to explore all kinds of stuff with this.

Good idea on the transition! I'll look up how to do that today. My rooms all just kind of run together at the moment.

I currently have it set to swap the player with a mouse pointer that is controlled the same way (WASD) and applications open when place_meeting, etc.
As for clutter, my faux desktop only has two applications right now: a fake email app and an app that dumps them back outside of the desktop environment.

Tbh, I had started designing none of this before I had posted yesterday and I'm surprised by how much I was able to get done. The framework is there now and it works in a way that makes sense for the rest of the game.
 
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zircher

Guest
In the long haul you're going to pushing a lot of text in front of the player. So, I would either have an object that handles that or a script that is called by the computer/email object. It would be the job of that object to navigate the data and track the character's location in it.
 

Yal

🐧 *penguin noises*
GMC Elder
Not exactly sure whether to support @Ninety's suggestion to simplify or not, since I feel a lot of fake GUIs are oversimplified enough to be ridiculous... but I guess it's heavily dependent on what the GUIs in your game are there for. If operating a computer is part of the experience and is there to make you feel fully immersed, you would want to make them as "realistic" as possible (Duskers is a prime example of this approach, and it somehow manages to make a game based around a DOS prompt a proper horror game thanks to the immersion the interface gives you). If they're just a device to further the storytelling, you would want to make them easy to use and not too distracting.
 

Ninety

Member
Oh I don't mean simplified to the point of ridiculousness, I just mean simplified enough to enhance readability over realism. Also since the OP mentioned "very simple version" specifically I felt my GUI advice was probably warranted ;)
 
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HedinnWeis

Guest
Not exactly sure whether to support @Ninety's suggestion to simplify or not, since I feel a lot of fake GUIs are oversimplified enough to be ridiculous... but I guess it's heavily dependent on what the GUIs in your game are there for. If operating a computer is part of the experience and is there to make you feel fully immersed, you would want to make them as "realistic" as possible (Duskers is a prime example of this approach, and it somehow manages to make a game based around a DOS prompt a proper horror game thanks to the immersion the interface gives you). If they're just a device to further the storytelling, you would want to make them easy to use and not too distracting.
Yeah, in this case it's not part of the core gameplay (which is just a top down shooter because I'm new to this) but just a way to convey information.

Anyone know what some pros and cons might be to making the emails themselves sprites instead of using pop up text boxes?
I know it'd be more art assets and that can be a con depending on how many separate ones there are, but I'm not sure how I'd go about creating a script that would display the correct text based on when the computer was being used.
 

Yal

🐧 *penguin noises*
GMC Elder
You could use an array containing strings (being the text of each e-mail) and then translate the "when the computer is used" variable (not too tricky if each use means one level, a bit trickier if you're gonna use real-life time but not at all impossible) into an index of this array. To actually draw the text, you'd probably want to look into draw_set_font() and draw_text_ext() - draw_text_ext() allows to automatically insert newlines to make the text fit in a box with a certain width, which is really useful for all sorts of textboxes.
 
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