Update 9: The complications of a simple pause

It is amazing. Something which sounds so simple was in fact the exact opposite to implement: Pause.

Initially, I wanted to change the scene to a more decorated pause screen where the player could choose to go back to the game or title screen and while I was able to do that, the save current scene to stack and restore previous scene from stack functions were very limited:

They did not save actor states/positions. Extra work was required to handle that.

They did not preserve player animation states. So, for example, if I were in mid-air jumping, paused and then unpaused....instead of being in a jumping animation state, the player would instead be in an idle one and drop to the ground. Unlike the actor problem stated above, this was one I couldn't elegantly handle unless I put in a delay with the pause to wait for the actor to drop before saving to stack and changing scenes.

I eventually reminded myself of how I wanted to make a simple game, reminiscent of the old school action platformers of the 80's and 90's. They didn't have complex pause screens. It was a simple tone and the screen froze or maybe there was a modal dialogue box or something. It was simple. Okay, it was decided. Let us go simple.

I then decided to implement the Dialogue box script built into GB Studio. It worked for the most part EXCEPT that there was no option to press start to close the Dialogue box. The only options are A, B or Any buttons. Well, that won't be elegant. What do I do now?

After a day of research, I figured out that I could export my project's engine and modify it. The compiler would then build my modified version instead of the default. And that is exactly what I did. I added the press of the Start button to the wait_flags. The patch for GB Studio 4.1.3 can be found on GitHub. There was one problem though, there was no easy way for me to modify the built in Dialogue box script to add Start as a selectable option. Enter the plugins!

I took the now deprecated Advanced Dialogue plugin originally developed by pau-tomas and forked it. It has been modified to support "close with the press of the Start button" and to adjust open/close speeds from the user interface. Viola! Success!

Feel free to use this patch and plugin from my GitHub repository as you see fit.