Animate Text in C# Console Applications: A Step-by-Step Tutorial

Welcome, in this tutorial, we will be writing code to animate text in a console application, simulating the appearance of text being typed on the screen. This tutorial is designed to help you learn how to add this feature to your own text adventure games. I broke it down in to steps so that anyone can follow along, So, let's get started!

Start a new console application in Visual Studio. Make sure to include using System.Threading; at the top. This statement is necessary because we will be using the Thread.Sleep method later in the code. Next, create a new static class called TextUtilities.

static class TextUtilities 
{
     // code goes here 
} 

Within the class, define a public static method called Type that takes in two parameters: a string called p_input and an integer called p_delay, the  p_input is the string you want to print, the p_delay is the delay time between printing each letter.

public static void Type(string p_input, int p_delay)
{
     // code goes here 
} 

In the method body, create a char[] called letters and set it equal to the p_input string converted to a character array, this  splits the string p_input into individual letters.

char[] letters = p_input.ToCharArray(); 

Next, use a foreach loop to iterate over each character in the letters array and use Console.Write to write the current character to the console. After writing the character, use Thread.Sleep to pause the program for a specified amount of time, in this case the p_delay parameter.

foreach (char c in letters) 
{
    Console.Write(c);
    Thread.Sleep(p_delay);
} 

After the foreach loop, use Console.Write to add a new line to the console.

Console.Write("\n");

That's it! The TextUtilities.Type method should now be able to type out an animated text message.

Here's the complete code:

using System.Threading;  
static class TextUtilities 
{     
    public static void Type(string p_input, int p_delay)     
    {
         char[] letters = p_input.ToCharArray(); 
         foreach (char c in letters)
         {             
             Console.Write(c);
             Thread.Sleep(p_delay);
         }
         Console.Write("\n");
     } 
} 

You can use this method in your code by calling TextUtilities.Type("Hello, World!", 50), for example, which will type out the message "Hello, World!" with a delay of 50 milliseconds between each character. I hope this helps you out in your text adventure adventures!