Intertitle - Title Cards for Every Place and Every Boss, for GameMaker

Title cards for GameMaker: every place your player walks into and every boss they face announces itself with a composed card, drawn in pure GML from facts your game already keeps. A stone lintel for a crypt, a riveted plate for a space station, a gilt lacquer panel for a chapel, a seal for the foe that waits at the end. No image files.

Tell Intertitle what a place is (its name, a few words for its setting, the place it sits in, what its foes strike with, how dangerous it is) and it builds the card: one of five constructions, one of fifteen devices, the line beneath the name, a rule for danger and lozenges for the places inside it. A boss is read the same way, from the elements it strikes with, the skills it casts, what it resists and where it ranks among your foes.

my_banner = itl_banner_create();
itl_banner_show(my_banner, itl_place_card({
    name: "The Old Mine", setting: "Dungeon", parent: "Greyfell",
    elements: { Earth: 4 }, danger: 2
}));
itl_banner_step(my_banner);                                   // Step
itl_banner_draw(my_banner, display_get_gui_width(), display_get_gui_height());   // Draw GUI

The place card

• Five constructions, built differently, not recoloured: an inked map cartouche with rolled ends, a woodcut board cut in relief, a lacquered panel in a gilt frame, a dressed stone lintel with joints and a crack, a riveted steel plate. The words that describe a place choose one.
• Fifteen devices. Eight come from an element's NAME, so a renamed element still works ("Hellfire" is a flame, "Thunderstorm" a bolt, and "Malice" is not frost). Five belong to the constructions, two to foes with no element at all.
• Danger you can see without colour. The rule under the name changes colour AND shape: pointed caps from band 2, a doubled rule and a red roundel at 3.
• A return is not a first visit. Walk back into a place and its card is plainer and shorter: no epithet, no marks, a smaller name.

The boss card

• A seal: a gold medallion carrying the device of the element it fights with, rays for how high it stands among your foes (8, 12 or 16), and a red fault line across the medallion for its greatest weakness.
• It holds the fight. A boss card jumps the queue and itl_banner_busy is true while it shows, so your battle waits for the foe to be named.

Tested

• Igor package build clean on the shipped source, and proven able to fail on it.
• 83 in engine assertions on a real built exe: every device measured as ink and no two closer than a one pixel nudge, every sample card covering its box with its name fitting, calm and lethal and first and return measured as different pictures, the banner's queue, and the refusals.
• 18 more in a blank project that installed the package the way you will and ran the Readme's own code.
• 72 adversarial calls against all 18 documented functions with zero crashes.

Requirements

GameMaker 2024.14 or newer (built and tested against runtime 2024.14.4.268). Pure GML: no extensions, no DLLs, no shaders, no sprites. Import the .yymps, open rm_itl_demo, press Play: N walks to the next place, B meets the next boss, R returns, D raises the danger.

One commercial licence, unlimited games, no attribution required. Everything the package draws in your game is yours to ship, including on your store page and in your trailers.

Also from this studio: Frontispiece, the title screen your game opens on, generated; Intertitle for RPG Maker MZ, the same cards for MZ projects; and more GameMaker systems at csaf.itch.io.

AI disclosure: the code and the generated artwork in this package were produced with AI assistance. Every store image was rendered by the product itself. Font for the names: IM Fell DW Pica (SIL OFL 1.1), notices included.