How to make characters clickable

[Hoomst]

In certain areas of my game I'd like to display characters that the player can talk to by clicking on them. When hovering over the character the image should get a bit brighter to indicate that it is clickable.

When first researching this, I stumbled upon someone recommending imagebuttons as character images.
While I managed to achieve what I wanted with that, there are also a few issues with that method. Like also hiding the characters when pressing the "h" key.

I then tried to use a normal image and apply a transformation on hover but that didn't do anything (it does change the image color when I delete the "on hover:").
Also I'm not sure how to make the images clickable.

Code: Select all

    
    image som = "main characters/som.png"

    transform hover:
        on hover:
            matrixcolor TintMatrix(Color(rgb=(.90,.90,1)))*BrightnessMatrix(-0.1)

    label room_som:
        scene
        show bg_room_som
        show som at hover
    
        $ renpy.pause(hard=True)

Another approach might be to display the character as an image, then putting an imagebutton of that image on top of it and transforming its opacity to 0.
While I think that this might work, i doubt its the best way to go about this.

I'm planning to have a lot of different characters in various locations so I'd prefer a method that doesn't need a lot of code per character.

I'd really appreciate your help on this one!

[Syrale]

I would definitely go with imagebuttons. You can avoid the "h" hiding thing by setting the screen's layer to "master". So something like:

Code: Select all

screen characterButton(character, position):
	layer "master"
	imagebutton: 
		idle character xpos position action ...

[Hoomst]

Thanks for the advice!
Setting the screen's layer to "master" did the job for me.