Novelty guides and tutorials > Getting started > Using actions

Using actions

In Novelty, you control the flow of your game through actions. An action is a slice of functionality meant to perform something specific in your game. It could be displaying a new paragraph of dialogue, moving objects around or displaying choice menus. One way of looking at them is as lines of code.

Every page in your novel have its own list of actions, that is triggered one by one, from top to bottom. Some actions will perform instantly and move on to the next while others will run over a period or time or until the player acts. The rightmost icon on the action blocks lets you know what type of action it is.

When all actions have been triggered in a page, the novel will move on to the next page.


Fig 1: The Action window


Creating and editing actions

New actions are easily added to the list by using the tools in the toolbar. New actions will be added at the bottom of the list or after the currently selected action.


Fig 2: Adding an action.

Once added, you can edit the properties of the action in the Properties window.


Fig 3: Editing a 'Change state' action.


Live preview

When selecting an action in the list Novelty will simulate the actions prior to that point and show you a live preview in the Scene view. This doesn't apply when selecting multiple actions and the preview should only be considered as an approximation.



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