itch.io

The issue which led to the creation of the Switcher showed up when Pine was about one‑third complete: I started getting serious lag and browser freezes while editing with Pulp. I tried everything I could think of, plus every suggestion from other Pulp developers and the Panic team. Nothing fixed it.

So I decided to ship the game on Itch as separate acts (i.e. multiple game files). That eliminated the development bottlenecks.

However, when Pine was accepted into Catalog, I ran into a new constraint since Panic required a single game file instead of three. To resolve this, Shaun Inman created a parent .pdx file in which multiple Pulp game .pdx files could be nested. Using a variable within the nested .pdx files, the parent file could be triggered, and the nested files switched.

Panic sent me the .pdx that handled the switching, and it was labelled... Switcher.