Missive - Letters Written in Their Senders' Hands, for GameMaker

Missive writes every letter your game delivers in its sender's own hand. Give it who wrote the letter and what it says; it writes the words out as pen strokes in that sender's handwriting, on the paper that sender would use, folds it, addresses the outside, seals it with their wax - and lets the player break the seal and open it.

Every image on this page was drawn by the package itself, rendered by the shipped build.

A hand for every sender

• 6 archetypes - clerk, scholar, soldier, noble, farmhand, spy - each varied by the sender's name, so two clerks never write alike and the same letter twice in one hand is never quite the same
• Slant, size, spacing, pen weight, jitter, joined or printed, and the ink colour all come from the hand; the writing is fitted to the page, so a short note is written large and a long letter small
• The greeting and the sign-off are the sender's too: My dearest Sir Aldous, from a noble, Wren - and In haste, from a soldier; a spy signs with an initial

The letter as an object

• 8 papers: laid, parchment, vellum, rag, blue, mourning (black-bordered), ledger (ruled, the writing sits on the rules) and brown scrap
• 10 seals in 7 waxes, standing up in relief: a monogram with the sender's own initial in their own hand, rose, crown, star, anchor, key, skull, swords, a paste wafer, or unsealed
• The outside: the recipient and address written on the folded packet, and a struck postmark if it went by post
• Age and damage: 5 ages (the paper tones and foxes, the iron-gall ink browns) and water with a tide-lined stain that washes the ink, fire eating a corner and the words with it, or a torn corner
• Opening: msv_draw_unfold plays the seal cracking, the outer panel lifting toward you and falling open, and the inner panel dropping - folded in thirds, in half or flat

my_letter = msv_letter("Captain Harrow",
    "The bridge at Callow is down. We hold the ford until the relief comes, or we do not.",
    { to: "Wren", place: "Callow Ford", date: "9th of Frost", address: "Quartermaster\nGreyhaven Keep" });
// Draw GUI
msv_draw_packet(my_letter, 40, 40, 360);            // folded, addressed and sealed
msv_draw_unfold(my_letter, 440, 40, 360, open_t);   // 0 = sealed .. 1 = lying open
msv_draw_letter(my_letter, 840, 40, 360);           // open

Each letter renders once into a cached surface; after that every frame is a single surface draw. A runnable demo room is included: the day's post on a desk, eight letters from eight senders, with keys to change the paper, the seal, the damage, the age and the fold.

Tested, not just compiled

The in-engine suite reported 200 of 200 assertions on the shipped build: the pen alphabet, hands that are stable per sender and different between senders, wrapping inside its width, every sheet outline the package can make proved fillable, the fitted writing inside its margins, and real drawing measured in pixels - fire and tears removing paper, every paper and every seal different from the default, the unfold matching the packet at the start and the open letter at the end, the address on the outside, a cache that reuses, bounds and frees its surfaces. The package was imported into a blank GameMaker project and used the way the Readme documents it (23 of 23 checks), 112 hostile calls against its documented API crashed nothing, and every function the Readme names was checked against the package (30 of 30).

Compatibility

• GameMaker 2024.14 or later; built and tested on runtime 2024.14.4.268 (not tested on GMRT)
• Pure GML: no extension, no shader, no sprite. Everything is namespaced msv_, MSV_ and global.msv_
• Every handwritten word is drawn as pen strokes; two Open Sans font resources (Apache-2.0, notice included) set the demo's labels and the postmarks
• You get the .yymps package, the full readable project, the Readme and the licence

Also from CSAF

Post the jobs those letters send people on with Chronicle, quest notices that draw themselves, and save the run with Colophon, save slots drawn as printed leaves.

AI disclosure: the code and the generated artwork of this package were written with AI assistance. It contains no audio.