Helping Hand Extra Features

Table of Contents

Click to expand Table of Contents

• Animated Parallax Stylegrounds
• HD Parallax Stylegrounds
• Reskinning Strawberries in Menus
• Custom Wipes
• Map Comments
• Custom Chapter Number

This page lists all features from Maddie's Helping Hand that are not entities, triggers or effects.

Animated Parallax Stylegrounds

This allows you to have an animation you can use as any other parallax styleground.

In order to make an animated parallax:

• add all your frames in Graphics/Atlases/Gameplay/bgs/MaxHelpingHand/animatedParallax/YourModName/bgName00.png, bgName01.png, etc...
• then, set up one of the frames as a parallax styleground in Ahorn / Lönn as you would for a regular parallax.

By default, the animation speed will be 12 frames per second (FPS), same as for decals, and the frames will play in order. If you want to customize either of those (including having frames that last longer than others), you can create a bgName.meta.yaml file next to bgName00.png, bgName01.png, etc:

FPS: 2
Frames: 0-5,6*4,9,8,7

• FPS is the animation speed in frames per second
• Frames is the frame order, you can remove that line if you just want to set the animation speed. It follows the same format as the frames attribute in Sprites.xml:
  • put the frame numbers separated by commas, like 4,2,8
  • instead of writing 3,3,3,3,3, you can write 3*5
  • instead of writing 4,5,6,7,8, you can write 4-8

This means the example file plays frames in this order, at 2 frames per second: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 6, 6, 6, 9, 8, 7.

Those steps also work with Sine Parallax Stylegrounds from Flaglines And Such 🔗, if you want your animated stylegrounds to oscillate as well.

HD Parallax Stylegrounds

This allows you to have a parallax styleground that renders in high resolution (1920x1080) instead of in-game resolution (320x180).

In order to make a parallax render in high definition, you just have to place it in Graphics/Atlases/Gameplay/bgs/MaxHelpingHand/hdParallax/YourModName/bgName.png, and to add it to your map like you would add any other parallax styleground.

There are some quirks to take into account though:

• Depending on whether the styleground is set to be in the background or in the foreground, it will render behind or in front of everything else, including other stylegrounds. This is because the entire gameplay is on a 320x180 "layer", so inserting a HD styleground in there would require changing how level rendering works, as opposed to just rendering a styleground behind / in front of gameplay.
• you might need to multiply X/Y and Scroll X / Scroll Y values by 6 compared to what you usually type, since 1920x1080 is 6 times 320x180.

Reskinning Strawberries in Menus

This allows you to reskin the strawberry on chapter cards or in the pause menu.

If your map is in Maps/yourmapfoldername/mapfilename.bin, put the strawberry image to use in Graphics/Atlases/Gui/MaxHelpingHand/yourmapfoldername/mapfilename_strawberry.png. To reskin the golden berry icon, do the same, but name the file mapfilename_goldberry.png instead. To apply the reskin to the entire yourmapfoldername campaign, you can put the icons in Graphics/Atlases/Gui/MaxHelpingHand/yourmapfoldername/strawberry.png and goldberry.png.

You can reskin the strawberry in the level itself by using Sprites.xml, check the wiki for that 🔗.

Custom Wipes

The wipe is the animation that is played to fade the screen out, most frequently when Madeline dies.

If you have a series of 1920x1080 PNG files in black and white (or black and transparent), you can turn it into a custom wipe. Visit this website for instructions! 🔗

Map Comments

You can place an entity called "Comment" on your map in order to take notes. You can either see the comment you made by right-clicking it, or have it directly displayed on the map.

This entity will have no effect in-game, and when distributing your map, you don't need to list Maddie's Helping Hand as a dependency, unless you use other things from the helper as well: if the player does not have it, they will only get warnings in their logs.

Custom Chapter Number

If you have Maddie's Helping Hand installed, you can change the line above the chapter name in the chapter panel, that usually shows the chapter number. To do this, if your map is in Maps/foldername/mapname.bin, add a dialog key to your English.txt named maddiehelpinghand_chapternumber_foldername_mapname. For example, for a map located at Maps/max480/18-switchybois2.bin, adding this line to English.txt:

maddiehelpinghand_chapternumber_max480_18_switchybois2= Switchy Switchy Chapter

gives this result: