itch.io

Sure, I'll try to explain my process :) long post incoming!

I'm using the chat contraption as a phone text app. Whenever the player clicks "next", a new message appears. That's cool! but I want my player to manually send the new messages on the right only. I want the messages on the left to appear on their own after a delay.

So I have a chat contraption called "chat1" and its corresponding button called "next". I added some lines in the "next" button script so that stuff happen. I'm sure there's a more compact way of doing this, but it works so I'm not complaining!

on click do
    play["click"]
    # show next chat
    chat1.next[]
    # add 1 to the counter (stored in slider)
    progress.value: progress.value+1
    # trigger the slider's "change" event
    progress.event["change" progress.value]
    view[]
end

As you can see in the button's script, I also have a slider called "progress". It starts at 0 and its Max is 17 (16 being the total number of messages in my chat contraption). You might want the slider be invisible in the final project (Widgets>Show None, & also Widgets>Locked, while you're at it).

My slider's script looks like this:

on change val do
    # call a "boop" event whenever the slider's "change" event is triggered
    scenePrologue.event["boop"]
end

I created a new event, "boop", that I use in the card level script to check on the phone conversation progress. "scenePrologue" is the current card's name. I'm not gonna show the whole card's script but I use something like this:

on boop do
    # check for chat convo completion
    if progress.value~1
        # increase value to avoid getting stuck in a loop
        progress.value: progress.value+1
        # pause to make the text message more realistic
        sleep[80]
        # show next chat
        chat1.next[]
    elseif ...
...

From there on, I had to match the slider's counter and the number of messages in my conversation so that all the messages on the left appear on their own after a delay, just like magic! :)

Of course you can use the counter to do something more than just revealing the next chat messages. You can use it to trigger a dialog for example, or to go to the next scene, just like this:

...
elseif progress.value~16
    progress.value: progress.value+1
    # fire next sequence
    eval[dialogStorage.widgets.script2.text () 1]
    pt.setup[deck sceneCafe
        "!show saya neutral offleft"
    ]
    go[sceneCafe "BoxIn"]
...

(if anything is unclear please don't hesitate to ask more questions.)