Archive:

"Text Writing"

Posted: 14 December, 2025

I hate doing tutorials, they’re time-consuming to do well, people skip over them, and it’s better to unfurl things in-game, anyway. But Gilby’s controls aren’t what people expect, so I’ve decided to bite the bullet and make one. This week was all about the text.

UE’s font materials are pretty powerful – Steve Streeting’s got a great write-up about them on his blog – but the text widgets are… a tad basic. If I’m gonna be forced to have text, then I want to add a bit of personality. So I started hunting around, and stumbled on Proto Wolf’s fantastic text printing tutorial . Even better, they also have a plug-in on FAB

I now have fancy printing, funky materials, and the bones of the state machine to lock / unlock controls as I direct the player. But I’ve probably got a few more days of work to tie everything together, and add fail / success states. Not gonna lie, it’s bloody tedious. And everyone’ll skip over it…

EH500

I couldn’t resist doing a bit more on this (honestly, I hate doing tutorials) so I thought I’d get the windows build up and running. And that ended up being an unexpected adventure. The engine’s written in C23, cos why not? I’ll have proper bool, nullptr, auto and constexpr, thankyouverymuch. Which stops me using Visual Studio, cos, you know, Microsoft being Microsoft. So I ended up landing on MSYS 2 and UCRT64.

There was a bit of faff to find the various packages that I use, but ultimately, I was able to get it configured with Meson, Ninja, and SDL3. And more importantly, build statically linked executables. So, the EH500’s properly cross-platform! And quite a funky little toy, imo.

I also:

• Replaced the hacky, pre-baked Copper style gradients, for a proper system that generates gradients on the fly, using macros.
• Baked in a default font, and text system.
• Added Aseprite file format support, for proper indexed-colour palette support / enforcement end to end.

Still no idea what, if anything, I’ll make with this.

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