Hello, welcome! I've seen several different text message situations in Decker games, with different behaviors and narrative purposes so it's hard to answer without knowing more about what you want for your own project. I'll start with clarifications and then go into some questions if that's okay?
I'm not seeing what in your script screenshot could be causing that error message specifically, so I suspect there's something else in the non-decoy version which is causing that.
It should just be a syntax error. Somewhere in your script Lil expected to find the name of something like a card, a widget, a variable or a function and what it found instead was a string (text enclosed in a pair of double-quotes). Again, I can't see the cause of this error in the decoy script as written.
The other thing you mentioned which I need to ask about is Contraptions, which the name for a reusable prototype made of bundled widgets and Lil script. The pre-built ones made by members of the community (such as in this forum's Contraption Bazaar) are usually easy to use and modify. On the other hand, making Contraptions from scratch is difficult without familiarity with Decker and Lil.
Did you mean widgets (the basic forms of interactive objects in Decker)? Or if you are using Contraptions it would be helpful to know more about them since they might have their own scripted behavior already.
Okay! Now let's talk about what behavior you're aiming for.
I know this involves your actual planned series of screen names and messages and some stylized fields that they'll be displayed in.
But in terms of drip feed, do you mean:
- messages appearing word-by-word or letter-by-letter?
- sometimes adding a new message to a log of previous messages?
- updating a specific field to display only the most recent message?
- and do messages even vanish?
- should the new message be displayed on a timer, or is there some other trigger you have in mind?
Knowing any of these specifics (or something else!) would make it possible to write guidance to build the specific version of text message interface that you want for your project.
Sorry to not have a one-size-fits all suggestion for you yet, but it seems like you have a specific vision in mind and I'd like to help you get there!