v0.3.0 — Scenarios power-up: variables, conditions, string templates!

Hello-hello! 👋 This took me quite some time 🥵 but I come again with the greatest update of yet — scenarios get a power boost with the introduction of variables and all the things related to them!

Variables can be used for tracking what a player did — they can count, they can remember a simple Yes/No value, or they can remember plain text! This gives you lots of power — you can make more natural games where players’ choices matter, you can make quests, you can make puzzles — and more!

Variables can be found in engine’s Settings tab, and when clicking “Manage variables” in the new Data group of blocks in the scenario editor. The new Data section brings a load of blocks to work with their data:

You can read more about these blocks and on how to use them in the new documentation page, and on how to make a simple fetch quest in our new tutorial!

A part of that update is that all the messages now support templates: you can put special markers that get replaced with a variable value, or make randomized messages! Read documentation on how to use them in our documentation.

Another big update is that you can now use Whimsy offline! For that, make sure you’re using the standalone web version hosted on web.whimsy.rocks. On mobile devices, you can even install Whimsy as an app by using your browser’s menu!

As always, this update also polishes the experience and squashes some bugs.

You might now notice that there is a tiny input delay when a message is shown — I saw how several players accidentally skipped various triggers in The Sleeper in the Gulf demo project, and decided that this feature(?) can remedy that and similar cases in your projects.

A location picker now automatically shows once you place a new exit, to skip an extra click and not make you search this exit in the exits list. Very handy!

Did you like this update? Then please take a bit of time to tell about Whimsy to your friends and fellow developers 💝

Here’s the full changelog:

✨ New features

• Variables, conditionals, templated strings, and new programming blocks for all of this! :sparkles: Block search in scenario editor’s block library
• PWA support (offline access and app installation in browser)

⚡ Improvements

• Add a link to docs to the top bar of the editor
• Add meta:description to web IDE for SEO discoverability
• Asset browsers: Improve scrollboxes of asset browsers and make sure asset creation buttons are always visible
• Player: Display Whimsy version in the Player instead of generic “MVP”
• Runtime: Ignore input completely a short time after a message or a dialogue line is shown; this is to help players skip them less by pressing movement buttons accidentally.
• Scenario editor: Add a bright red outline to unfilled fields
• Stage editor: Automatically prompt to input a location once you place a new exit in a stage
• Stage editor: Labels on exits should be a bit more legible now
• 🌐 Update Russian translation

🐞 Bug fixes

• Scenario editor: Fix some data values being linked after a block has been duplicated
• Scenario editor: Fix weird thumbnails of animated actors in actor-related blocks
• Scenario editor: Now scenarios will be auto-saved reliably if an app was closed with a scenario open
• Stage editor: Fix location pickers showing unedited stages’ state until a project is reopened, and it perhaps fixed some other issues with stale actor and prop data as well
• Stage editor: Fix the first stage’s color being reset to the first one every time you open the stages panel
• Tile editor: Fix squished tumbnails after turning an animated tile into a static one

📔 Documentation

• First ever tutorial! Making a simple fetch quest
• Added docs on variables and conditionals
• Added docs on string templates