Cut Scenes or Text Overlap ingame?

[Heppell08]

I was thinking of a way to do this and I'm unsure on the most practical way to do? I had the idea of mapping my worlds X position, then when the player hits that X, something happens. I like the idea of having the game input pause, the associating camera to zoom a little and a text box to appear. After that, the camera is positioned back to gameplay standard, the text is removed and the game carries on. Anyone got any ideas on this? I can't think of an example but if you think of the game zooming maybe 2x in on the player, text appearing in a bubble, the text cycles through, then the game continues on. Any help? Thanks

[Biggerplay]

Not sure what you mean there, but http://www.goodboydigital.com/runpixierun/ does some zooming effects when your character hits something etc.

[Heppell08]

@Biggerplay

What I mean is, if I map the world of my games X direction, then when my player gets to say :game.world.x == 350; I'd have a text bubble appear, in the bubble it could say, * ahead of you is a trap! Avoid it if you can!* then player would carry on, walk up to said trap and avoid it. The bubble appears at the 350 X position because at 450 X position there is a trap I've created, if that makes sense anyway. Just because I think my game is going to be heavily influenced by a story and I want the story told via text and game input pauses to prevent skipping. If I can find an example I'll post it here. Hope I'm making sense lol

[Heppell08]

The closest I got in my head for the text was to create a storyText group and parent it to the play, then in game update create the X positions to activate text to show, then using the group I'd make the assigned text visible true, then false after a certain distance. The issue with that is I'm loading loads of text in bulk. I'd prefer to create it when needed ingame. The issue there is I wanted it on player x and y but it spams multiple texts at that position and that's not the effect I'd like lol. So I'm totally unsure. I could create a seperate js with all text in it and pull from that into my game but its the same as loading a bulk amount of text again. I'm not sure at all lol.

[Vidsneezes]

Like a trigger system? when the player walks over x,y display message?
i don't think bulk text loading is bad. But what you can do is have like cast message system (made up name)
Where the player scans x pixels in front of him to see if there is an object there.
the object.

So if the player scans and there's an object there, then it would activate that object's message.
if your text was in a json format(or xml) you can have the message retrieved by specifying a case for it.

Like if your player is level 1. He scans and finds object "baddie"

You would do something like:

"activate Warning" get from "TextFile_1" in "Level1" type "baddie"

where activate Warning would be a method that takes a

"TextFile_1" would be where all your text is located

"Level1" woudl be the current level

"baddie" is the object scanned by the player

then the activate Warning method would retrive the warning for that "baddie" when it's in "Level1"

After that you would have a drawWarning message which would internally call the activate Warning method and set your warning message to your text variable.

and your warning would also have to be set in front of the player, so you would set your text variable's  x coord to the player's x coord plus some number offset

(if it's a platformer)
 

[Heppell08]

@VidSneezes

Yeah I was thinking of something similar to that but not in JSON or XML. I was debating a preloader like state but just for texts. Then when I need them adding them to a group in the game state to appear and disappear at given times. The main issue other than the text prompts is pausing the game input for a given time and getting the camera to have a little zoom in on the player. I think a grouping of text with parent child relationship with the player may be the way to go and yeah I'm starting to think that if I have to bulk load text I'll just add a preloader bar for the game loading. I didn't want a big load time but I think that may change when sounds and more levels become part of the game. I have been debating 1 long level with a check point system but I'm in early stages of that stuff at the minute. Jusy trying to get some cutscene stuff in to see how I'll go about the change in levels or enviroments.