Keep trigger and response names visible

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.

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.

Moving between Figma and Protopie

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.

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.

Playing with time

A message sent to the current scene will be received by the object that sent it. But a message sent to Protopie Studio (Connect) will not be received by the pie that sent it. B ut what if there is nothing out there to respond to it?

Check if Protopie Connect is present

If you are building a prototype that depends upon Protopie Connect then it is a good idea to start by checking if Connect is actually present.

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.

Sending and receiving mismatched messages

Use Variables

Use overridable variables in components

Viewing variables within Components

Check if Protopie Connect is present

Origami Studio, Figma and others