Using Mosaics

It took me awhile of tootling around with ACK to realize the usefulness of Mosaics. Basically a mosaic is a screen built from the same tile grahics you use for your game’s creatures, objects and terrain, but it is simply a still image. You can call up a mosaic from a macro, for instance to create a cut scene, and have a series of mosaics where only certain parts of the still change image change, to create an animation or narrative effect. Also, you choose to call up a mosaic with any blank spaces in it treated as transparent space (you do this with the TMOSAIC macro command).

That way, for instance, a long message you previously displayed will show through the transparent section, allowing you to combine text and graphics. In the “Configure Adventure” menu, you can choose to have a certain macro run as the game’s Title screen, and that macro can cycle through a series of long message/transparent mosaic combos, like used in the title screen of the game “Caravan” that comes with ACK:

Likewise you can set a macro to play long message/tmosaic combos as the game’s Intro right after the player chooses a character, and at any other time in your game. Such macros will look something like this:

LMSG 6
TMOSAIC 16
WAITKEY
LMSG 7
TMOSAIC 22
WAITKEY
etc…