All courses / C# Basics for Game Makers / Your first program
Printing a text box
Challenge lesson, about 9 min, +20 XP
Inside the tower, Nico stops at the trading stall. The game shows the blacksmith's words in a frame, so the player can tell speech from scenery. You can build that frame today with nothing but lines of text: the keyboard characters +, - and |. No graphics and no engine.
The console shows text in a monospaced font. Every character, including each space, takes exactly the same width. So if two lines have the same number of characters, they end at the same spot on screen. A text box is therefore a counting job, not an art job. Count right and the edges line up. Count wrong and the box looks like it lost a fight.
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