Formatting Help

This help page is designed to enhance your ability to use the formatting functionality. The idea is to give you all the tools you need to fully take advantage of this feature and make your scenes more customized to the player's current state in regards to their items and stats. Subjects that will be covered are:

Displaying a Stat

First, the most basic thing you can do with the formatting is to display the value of a stat. The way to do this is to place the name of the stat inside of double brackets. So if your stat's name is 'Dollars', then you would display the value by adding {{ Dollars }} to your scene content. See the below example:

Editor:

Player:

As you can see in the example, where {{ Dollars }} was placed in the editor was replaced with '50', the current value of the 'Dollars' stat, when viewing this scene while playing.

Displaying Text if Player has Item

Next, another useful feature of this scene content formatting is the ability to only show certain text when the player has a certain item. This can be done by placing the text that you want to hide if the player does not have the item between {{#if Item }} and {{/if}}, where 'Item' represents the name of the item. See the below example:

Editor:

Player:

In the example, you can see the player clicking the 'Buy Popcorn' button, which allows them to acquire the 'Popcorn' item. That, in turn, allows them to see the 'Hope the popcorn isn't too salty!!' text that is in between {{#if Popcorn }} and {{/if}} in the editor. On the flip side, you can see that when the player chooses to 'Go Straight to your Seat', they do not acquire the 'Popcorn' item and therefore cannot see the additional message.

One additional note on this point is that you can put all of your if statement on the same line in order to save space if you wish. It would look something like
{{#if Popcorn }}Hope your popcorn isn't too salty!!{{/if}}

Displaying Text if Stat Meets Conditions

Another tool that could possibly be helpful to you is the ability to conditionally show text based on stat values. We currently support five methods which you can do this:

  1. Greater Than: greater
  2. Less Than: less
  3. Equal To: equal
  4. Greater Than or Equal To: greater_or_equal
  5. Less Than or Equal To: less_or_equal

Each of these methods takes in two numbers and can be used in the if statement which was initially covered in the previous section. It is written like
{{#if (greater Dollars 15)}}You have more than $15.{{/if}}
That will check if the value of your 'Dollars' stat is greater than 15 and if it is, will display the text. In order to use another one of the methods, you could just replace the word greater with any of the other methods listed above. Make sure to note that when you using these methods the first argument is the item that you are checking to see if it is greater, less, etc. than the second item. See the below example:

Editor:

Player:

For this example, we are only showing the 'You have enough money to go to the movies and buy popcorn!!' message when the 'Dollars' stat is greater than or equal to 15. As you can see, when the player chooses to 'Open Lemonade Stand', they then have $50 and can see the message accordingly, but if they choose to 'Be Lazy', then they have $0 and cannot see the message.

It is important to note that just like in the previous section, you can put the whole if statement all on one line. For example,
{{#if (less Dollars 100)}}You do not have $100.{{/if}}
is perfectly valid.

One final note is that you can use these methods to compare two stats to one another as well. Let's say you want to know if your player has equal amounts of their 'Speed' and 'Strength' stats. It would be as simple as
{{#if (equal Speed Strength)}}You are just as fast as you are strong.{{/if}}

Displaying Text using Advanced Conditionals

We have three more ways that can take your scene content to the next level by enhancing the abilities of the if statement that we have introduced in previous sections.

Else Statements

The first advanced form of using the conditionally displayed text is the else statement. Basically, it allows you to display alternate text if your initial condition is not met. To do this, you just need to add {{^}} between your two initial if statement segments. So to put it all on line it would look like
{{#if Popcorn }}You have popcorn!{{^}}You do not have popcorn.{{/if}}>
It will display the text from before {{^}} if the initial if statement is true and it will display the text from after {{^}} if that initial if statement is false. See the below example:

Editor:

Player:

As seen above, when the player successfully acquires the 'Popcorn' item, they see the text in the first part of the if statement. But when they choose to not 'Buy Popcorn', they then see the text from after the {{^}}, which would otherwise be known as the else statement.

Negating an If Statement

The next advanced way to use the conditionals is using the not method to negate your if statement. This method takes in one true or false argument and then negates it by making true arguments false and vice versa. You can use this to show text if your player does not have an item or to check if your player's stat is not greater than a certain number. Of course, you could always just use the less than or equal method, but where's the fun in that? Anyways, see the below example:

Editor:

Player:

In this example, you can see that we are only showing the user the text about how bad sprinkles are if the player chose to not get the item 'Sprinkles'.

Combining Conditionals

The final advanced techique for using conditionals in your templating is by combining multiple conditionals using on of our two methods of doing so:

  1. Both Conditionals are True: both
  2. Either of the Conditionals are True: either

The both method would be used when you want to check if two different things are true, like when you need to see if a player has a certain item AND a certain stat is high enough. The either method is for when you only need one of those things to be true. They can still both be true but to show the text in the if statement, only one being true is required. For example, you want to show a message to your players who you either have the 'Sword' item OR have 'Strength' above 50 to let them know that they are currently well set up to win the fight at the end of their adventure. You can see another example below:

Editor:

Player:

In this one, the player has more than the $10 either way as demonstrated by just displaying the amount of the 'Dollars' stat on this screen, but you only see the text if the player also accepted the 'Coupon' item because you needed both to be true to see the text.

Displaying Results of Math Functions on Stats

The final thing I am going to teach you today is how to use math on your stats. We currently support four math methods that you can use:

  1. Addition: add
  2. Subtraction: subtract
  3. Multiplication: multiply
  4. Division: divide

All of these methods take in two numbers and do exactly what their names imply. The add method adds the two numbers and the rest also do what you expect. You should note with subtract and divide that it is subtracting the second number from the first number or dividing the first number by the second number. Just think how you would write those equations in elementary school. That is how you can determine which number should be listed first or second. See the below example:

Editor:

Player:

This example shows the values of your two stats 'Dollars' and 'Deliciousness' being 50 and 2 respectively. Then, you can see the multiply method take those two stats and multiply them together to get 100. It is really pretty simple when you think about it.

Additional Notes

In this last section, I just wanted to note that you can combine all of these methods fairly easily. You just need to remember the format for how it works. You first put the name of the method (greater, both, subtract, etc.). Then, you have a space followed by your first argument. Then, there is another space followed by your second argument, unless you are using the not method, which only has one argument. If you want to use another function as one of your arguments, just make sure that you place that function call within parentheses. Also, take note that stats are all numbers and items are all true or false booleans. The comparing methods take in two numbers and return a boolean. The math methods take in two numbers and return a number. The not method takes in one boolean and returns a boolean. Finally, the combining conditionals methods take in two booleans and return a boolean, so while combining methods make sure you take all of that into account.

In order to try out the example story that was being created throughout this tutorial, click here.

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