Yes this is absolutely a performance issue. Displaying text real time is horrendously slow on Playdate, so every text box is pre rendered between turns. I could make some real time masking trickery but I’m not sure it’s worth the effort, considering how fast the dialogue box appears anyway. However I agree that it would feel better if the text didn’t pop all at once at the end. Thank you for the feedback. I’ll look into it.
Actually, I did look into it and it's fixed. Now the text is revealed as the dialogue box open. It doesn't give you much more time to read, but it looks a lot cleaner.
I just noticed this in your new post. (missed notification of your reply) Looks great!
This was quite some time ago now, but do you remember what the trick was, technically? (why didn't you think it would work at first, and what did you learn that allowed it to work?)
Yes it wasn’t really that difficult. A bit hard to explain but I’ll try.
The thing is, since rendering text is awfully slow, every time you see a dialogue box in the game, it’s pre rendered in an image, and then the image is drawn on screen every frame.
So in order to animate the box reveal with the text at the same time, I need to display the image in two passes. First I draw a new mask in the dialogue box image (that mask reveals more and more as the box grows), and then the box is drawn on screen. Initially I was just an imaging a white square polygon and then replaced it with the image with the text once it was fully open. It’s not a big hit on performance but since there’s no gpu on the Playdate you have to be mindful of everything you draw if you want to maintain 50 fps.
