Awhile ago, I announced my Rich Text Popup Plugin for my RPG Developer Bakin game The Princess Oracle. So I thought it was about time I shared an update on its progress and eventual release.
Origins & Issues
To give a bit of context as to why this plugin was created in the first place: my game The Princess Oracle was originally submitted to AmalgamAsh’s SGB Revival Game Jam and included a popup system for messages such as tutorials, item acquisition notices, and similar notifications. However, because of SGB’s limitations, the system was tied to a fairly clumsy common even setup that relied on the Wait command to display each popup.
The result was that the game would temporarily pause whenever one of these popups appeared, which quickly became restrictive and awkward to work with.
After deciding to continue development of the game in Bakin, including expanding its popup system, I wanted something more flexible than the simplistic message setup used in the original version of The Princess Oracle. That eventually led me into developing a dedicated plugin for it.
Plugin Development
What initially started as a fairly straightforward project gradually evolved into a much more dynamic system with a wide range of additional features: support for bold, italic, and underlined text; headers; color formatting, gradient colors; and a variety of other functions and styling options.
Alongside the standard animated popup, I also added support for static popups, as well as a shake effect that can be used to add extra emphasis or impact to messages. These functions can all be triggered through Bakin’s Call C# Command in events.
You can view all of its features on its dedicated Itch.io page.
Companion Tool
Because the plugin works through text and escape commands – similar to Bakin’s message input support – with everything then stored inside string variables, I’m also developing a companion tool to make creating, parsing, and previewing popups much easier before they’re actually called in-game.
I don’t have any immediate plans to release the plugin just yet. At the moment, it’s still game-exclusive during development, mainly because there are still a number of bugs and issues that need ironing out.
That said, I’m aiming for a public release some time in May, alongside its companion tool.
Background Study
Over the past five months or so, I’ve been studying Bakin’s plugin architecture and, more broadly, C# as well as analysing Jagonz’s plugins in particular to understand how everything is structured and put together.
Use of AI tools – notably DeepSeek – has been instrumental in learning what the different components do, where they fit within the system, and how Bakin handles its overall plugin structure and behavior. It’s been genuinely helpful in explaining everything on the Bakin Plug-In Reference site. Thus, armed with this knowledge, I’ve been able to create this plugin from scratch – no vibe-coding, just my new-found knowledge, my whiskey and me – with more plugins planned in the future.
