Sending messages to two places

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?

Sending a message to another scene

This is a very easy mistake to make – sending a message to be picked up by a component, but one that you have in fact placed into a different scene. Although you can send to a different pie, you can't send to a different scene.

Origami Studio, Figma and others

How do these other popular platforms compare?

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.

The wrong variable type

This pitfall is not a big deal, but it can waste you time as you try to track down why your variable seems to have the wrong value (or no value). It can also bite you in a formula where your variable is of the wrong type for the formula.

Why use Protopie?

There are many prototyping tools out there, so what makes Protopie special – how is it different?

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.

Arrays and multiple parameters

Viewing variables within Components

Check if Protopie Connect is present

Using the wrong mental model for Protopie

parseJson gives no error message

Good Prototyping Practice