Viewing variables within Components

The variable debugger doesn’t work when the variable that needs to be viewed is inside a component. There are two relatively easy ways to deal with this.

Use a ‘Speak’ response at an appropriate point to speak the value of the variable. Deactivate this response when you no longer need it and then you can reactivate it later if needed again.
Create a text object in the component and use a ‘Detect’ trigger to set the text value of that object. This is easier to see, but requires a bit more work to set it up – and it messes with the visual design.

With the speak method it is very easy to switch to tracking a different variable. And if you are not using Speak responses elsewhere they are also very easy to find.

Sending messages to two places

Whilst it is important to be careful in sending messages to the right places, it is also very powerful to send a message to two different places at the same time (or maybe with a small delay).

Using the wrong mental model for Protopie

Most prototyping tools for designers use the frame-by-frame, or multiple dartboards model. But Protopie is much closer to a developer's object-oriented model of an application UI.

Receive and Assign hazard

Receiving a message, and then assigning a value and then writing a conditional based on that value is that something that is quite a normal, conceptual pattern – but in Protopie it will often not work as expected. This is because responses to Protopie triggers all happen simultaneously and not in the order written.

Distinctive initial variable values

It can sometimes be very helpful to use -99 and "null" for the initial values for your number and text variables.

Moving between Figma and Protopie

Use overridable variables in components

By using an overridable variable in your components you can have many instances of the component in your scene, but with different values for the same variable.

How to inspect variables inside a component

Even all-Scenes variables are not accessible inside a component. And this can lead to hard to find errors when a variable with the same name is used in a component, but its value is not sync'd with the scenes.

Sending and receiving mismatched messages

You can send messages in different ways, but Protopie requires you to receive them in the matching way. A common (and easy) mistake is to send a message to a 'parent' while wanting to receive it from the current scene.

Keep trigger and response names visible

Check if your other pie is present

Why use Protopie?

Using the wrong mental model for Protopie

Sending a message to another scene

Receive and Assign hazard