Wanted - Every Bounty Prints Its Own Poster, for GameMaker

Every bounty in your game prints its own wanted poster. Wanted generates the whole sheet in pure GML from the bounty record: a woodcut of the quarry on a cut ground, WANTED in wood type, the name, the charge, the reward, the issuing jurisdiction's wax seal - on aged paper that has been nailed to a board, rained on and torn. Claim the bounty and the same sheet is overprinted CLAIMED. No image files.

A quest board usually shows the same parchment rectangle for every job, or a handful of hand-drawn posters you assign by hand. Wanted reads the bounty - which beast, what reward, who issued it - and prints a poster from that, so a whole board of bounties looks like a real town board without you drawing a single one. The same bounty always prints the same poster.

my_bounty = wnt_poster({ quarryId: "wyvern", name: "The Ash Wyvern of Holloway Fen",
                         reward: 1250, jurisdiction: "THE MARCH OF HOLLOWAY" });
wnt_poster_draw(my_bounty, x, y, 200, 300);     // baked once, one sprite after that
my_bounty.status = "claimed";                   // the next draw is overprinted

What your players see

• 49 woodcut quarry figures: wolves, boars, a wyvern, serpents, bears, stags, spiders, a hydra, an anglerfish, a heron, a basilisk and more, each a hand-authored silhouette cut on its own ground inside a ruled block frame.
• 4 paper stocks that differ in tooth, fibre, laid lines and tone (rag, pulp, linen, tar), not one sheet in four tints.
• Letterpress type set glyph by glyph in a wood-type face: every letter carries its own baseline jitter and ink weight, and now and then one prints light. Long names break over two lines instead of shrinking to nothing.
• 12 seal devices struck into the wax in relief that stays legible on any wax colour, 10 crime marks and 5 fleurons for the cast border.
• Weathering that follows from the board: real holes at the nails (whatever the poster hangs on shows through), rain streaks running down from them, specks, a sun-faded side and, on an old sheet, a torn-off corner.
• Posted, claimed, expired: a claimed bounty's seal splits and CLAIMED is overprinted in red; an expired one is overprinted EXPIRED.

Built for a real game

• Every poster is baked once into a sprite and drawn as one sprite after that (measured: 193 to 216 ms for a 300 x 450 poster across three test runs on our machine, VM runtime). Bake when a bounty is posted, not every frame.
• Hand it your own enemy data: wnt_quarry_for("Giant Rats of the Sewer") picks the rat. Every field is optional and an unusable one falls back to a default, never a crash.
• Everything is namespaced wnt_. Nothing touches your rooms, layers or objects.

Tested

• Igor package build clean on the shipped source, and proven able to fail.
• 632 in-engine assertions on a real built exe, held to our RPG Maker MZ original: for 98 bounties, every random draw, every record and every path, fill and stroke - 174,029 operations - match the original exactly. Plus ink on rendered posters, the nail holes, the torn corner, the overprint, determinism and the cache.
• 21 more in a blank project that installed the package the way you will and ran the Readme's own code.
• 36 adversarial calls against the documented functions with zero crashes.

Requirements

GameMaker 2024.14 or newer (built and tested against runtime 2024.14.4.268, VM). Pure GML: no extensions, no DLLs, no shaders, no sprites. Import the .yymps, open rm_wnt_demo, press Play: a town board of eight bounties; arrows select, C claims, X expires, N posts a new bounty. Wanted makes no sound.

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.

Paid, from the same studio

• Wanted Posters for RPG Maker MZ ($14.99): the original, with a bounty board scene.
• Chronicle ($12.99): the quest board and its notices, for GameMaker.
• Missive ($14.99): every letter, writ and note your game delivers, drawn as a document, for GameMaker.
• Cartouche ($14.99): a dialogue box drawn as an object, different for every speaker, for GameMaker.

More GameMaker systems at csaf.itch.io.

AI disclosure: the code, the generated artwork and the sample bounty text in this package were produced with AI assistance. Every store image, the cover and the GIF were rendered by the product itself. Type: Rye and IM Fell DW Pica (SIL OFL 1.1) and Open Sans (Apache 2.0), notices included.