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[ZServ]

I am trying to figure out how to make an event that can alter a part of the map.

So I have some bones on the ground that are blocking a path and the player has to have a bottle of "acid" to melt the bones away. I have everything working except a way to remove those bones.

Anyone have any ideas?

Put a tile underneath the bones, get rid of the bones. Now, make an event and use the bones from Tileset B/C to make the bones appear. Make a conditional branch that checks if item exists, in this case acid. Make it remove that item, then activate a self switch. Then, create a new event page that is set "below character" and will only appear if that self switch is active.

Now, how this works is that the bones will appear and be impassible. If the player interacts with the item while they have the acid, the bones will disappear, as will the acid.

 

[esterk]

I am trying to figure out how to make an event that can alter a part of the map.

So I have some bones on the ground that are blocking a path and the player has to have a bottle of "acid" to melt the bones away. I have everything working except a way to remove those bones.

Anyone have any ideas?

Hmm. Have a switch activate when the character gets the acid.Have the bones be an event. When the player touches them, have a conditional branch setup that checks to see if that switch is active. If it is, have the event remove the acid and activate a self switch, going to an empty page. That will delete the bones.

That's what I can think of, maybe there is a better way someone else has.

Edit: beaten like Rihanna

 

[ZServ]

Edit: beaten like Rihanna

Ouch.

Also, if you *really* wanted to get fancy you could make page 2 be a smoking animation and make it wait like 40ms then activate self switch b and then have an empty spot, so then it'd smoke as it was interacted with and then be cleared. Play a neat lil sound effect for extra measure?

 

[Stuggernaut]

Trying this now...

 

[Stuggernaut]

Ok that worked well.

Fun stuff

Now working on making other conditions in the "Room" change when that center piece is gone. The event is basically to use acid, found in dungeon, to melt bones, that will then activate the center star, make outer ones glow and open a door...lol

 

[Mr. Luchador]

Any idea why this is happening: http://youtu.be/tkTUt5LsOrQ?t=27m8s

I've imported the tilesets to where they should be, and added a default outside to Slot A (Animation). However that tileset doesn't import 'correctly'. When I run the game it shifts through the tiles like in the video.

 

[Tommy Gun]

Any idea why this is happening: http://youtu.be/tkTUt5LsOrQ?t=27m8s

I've imported the tilesets to where they should be, and added a default outside to Slot A (Animation). However that tileset doesn't import 'correctly'. When I run the game it shifts through the tiles like in the video.

Don't put it in the Animation slot? I'm assuming you're not using animated tiles for the grass or whatever it's supposed to be there. If it's a tileset you downloaded, it should say which slot to use. If you made it yourself, look at some of the default tilesets and see how they're formatted.

 

[VandalD]

Any idea why this is happening: http://youtu.be/tkTUt5LsOrQ?t=27m8s

I've imported the tilesets to where they should be, and added a default outside to Slot A (Animation). However that tileset doesn't import 'correctly'. When I run the game it shifts through the tiles like in the video.

Well, wherever you put it, it looks like it thinks it's a water tile.

 

[Mr. Luchador]

Don't put it in the Animation slot? I'm assuming you're not using animated tiles for the grass or whatever it's supposed to be there. If it's a tileset you downloaded, it should say which slot to use. If you made it yourself, look at some of the default tilesets and see how they're formatted.

This is what I thought, but then people have suggested that it's fine to have it in the animation slot. I'll try in another slot and see what happens.

Well, wherever you put it, it looks like it thinks it's a water tile.

Yeah!

I guess it was the tiles being in the animation slot. Well ain't I dumb! Thanks guys.

 

[Aquamarine]

I'm still slowly chiseling out the exact dialogue for my story in a hotel room, but it's been really hard as I had to fly to Tokyo for work obligations and that usually takes up the majority of each day.

 

[ZServ]

I now have a partner in crime for development! We've been peeling away at combat. Boss mechanics for the first boss are looking very cool to me right now. Dialogue is still weak, but unfortunately that's how it goes when you're not a writer. Progress pics soon.

 

[mattmanp]

Man, the in progress pics are making me feel intimidated, haha. I'll do my best but not optimistic now.

 

[HP_Wuvcraft]

Okay. I know I'm late but I'm working on tutorials tomorrow and hopefully have something up soon.

 

[ZServ]

Man, the in progress pics are making me feel intimidated, haha. I'll do my best but not optimistic now.

Remain optimistic! The fact at hand is that most of us are amateurs. The ones that aren't will likely be able to leverage the tech to their advantage, so as long as you're making the game not to win, but for people to enjoy, then there's plenty to be optimistic about

 

[BlackJace]

E3 is ensuring that I get no work done....

 

[HP_Wuvcraft]

So, switches work fine, but the NPC locations always revert back to their normal states whenever I re-enter an area. Any help?

 

[ZServ]

So, switches work fine, but the NPC locations always revert back to their normal states whenever I re-enter an area. Any help?

Something is resetting your switches then. Or something like that. If you don't mind taking screenshots of it I could try and see what the problem is? Or do you mean literally their location?

 

[Relix]

Damn I may not make this. Work and life is getting too busy. Fuuuu

 

[HP_Wuvcraft]

Something is resetting your switches then. Or something like that. If you don't mind taking screenshots of it I could try and see what the problem is? Or do you mean literally their location?

I mean the location.

 

[ZServ]

I mean the location.

Event locations aren't stores after you leave the room. They're just restored from their original point. If you've got a major detail that requires them to be in a certain area and feel like sharing, a solution might be plausible.

ALTERNATIVELY there *is* a method but it's incredibly janky. You'd want to store the X, Y location of each event as a separate variable and then move the event to that location on player entry, BUT the issue is that 1) events within player sight at entry will instantly disappear 2) it will require you setting a command to store this stuff in every transfer event 3) it takes up a shit ton of variables.

 

[originalself]

I picked up RPG maker in that sweet humble bundle. Never used the program before but with the great tutorials I am hoping to have a small game done by the deadline. I am having a lot of fun with this so far.

 

[esterk]

Man I just keep getting too many ideas. Need to make a list of 'core features/systems' and 'if I have time features'

 

[kai3345]

E3 is ensuring that I get no work done....

lol same here. Although I did make at least a bit of progress today constructing my first dungeon.

 

[HP_Wuvcraft]

Event locations aren't stores after you leave the room. They're just restored from their original point. If you've got a major detail that requires them to be in a certain area and feel like sharing, a solution might be plausible.

ALTERNATIVELY there *is* a method but it's incredibly janky. You'd want to store the X, Y location of each event as a separate variable and then move the event to that location on player entry, BUT the issue is that 1) events within player sight at entry will instantly disappear 2) it will require you setting a command to store this stuff in every transfer event 3) it takes up a shit ton of variables.

I found a script.

But first I decided to try to get it done myself. I found a workaround by simply adding a "toll box" for my NPC to move to -

- and at least now he's facing in the right direction when I re-enter maps.

 

[ZServ]

Gah. Making new areas is a pain. It's much easier to fill an area with more content than to make new areas for me. But, I don't want to force players to potentially spend 45 minutes feeling like they're grinding. I need to replay Majora's Mask and take some notes.

 

[ZenaxPure]

Man I just keep getting too many ideas. Need to make a list of 'core features/systems' and 'if I have time features'

Haha, I am in the same boat. I keep thinking of new things I'd like to put in the game I am working on. I came to the exact same conclusion really: pick what is absolutely needed to make the core of the game work and then if I have any left over time I will add other ideas. Hope I can finish by the deadline, but, not holding my breath.

Gah. Making new areas is a pain. It's much easier to fill an area with more content than to make new areas for me. But, I don't want to force players to potentially spend 45 minutes feeling like they're grinding. I need to replay Majora's Mask and take some notes.

Making new areas is my least favorite part of the whole process. For starters I'm not terribly good at making maps which does not help the fact that I don't really enjoy making them either. I think I am close to having every map I want to use for the game done, though, which is a good feeling.

 

[hitsugi]

Was originally working on a modded ARPG engine, but it isn't feeling right.. and after seeing some of the finest examples ever created in RPG Maker (which still didn't feel right to me), I don't feel it's a worthy investment of my time to push it. I'm going to go a more traditional route, but maintain 8-way movement.

Also going back to the drawing board. I want the ideas out on paper because my brain gets scrambled up REAL quick.

 

[Earthpainting]

I'm afraid I have less to show than I planned. I've been messing with some systems and some sloppy execution made me have to re-tool some ideas. I'll get there though. Some rudimentary tile and sprite-work has been made for me to play around with.

1) events within player sight at entry will instantly disappear.

This is easily bypassed by making your screen fade to black before changing maps and then fading back in when all event prepping is done. It's a little extra work, but I learned to make a habit of it. You may even be able to play a little with your transitions a bit this way too. Little stuff like fading to black when you enter indoor areas and fading to white when you go back outdoors conveys the idea of eyes adjusting to light.

 

[ZServ]

Anyone have any experience with making equipped items have effects in the overworld? Like items that increase movement speed or heal the player while not in combat?

 

[Dusk Golem]

I'll be able to post some progress on my game pretty soon, been busy the last few days like many others.

However, the prizepool might be even bigger than I was anticipating. In less than a month of prize collecting and I already have 110 unique game (trying not to make any repeats) available, so I might manage to get more than my estimated 200. This is a mixture of myself buying games for the giveaway, some bundled games, and friends donating some games though. Still not bad for less than a month of collecting, especially as the full prize pool won't be seen until September.

Anyone have any experience with making equipped items have effects in the overworld? Like items that increase movement speed or heal the player while not in combat?

I'll see if anyone knows more than I do, but whenever I have items that are supposed to do something when equipped, usually I just use a switch so that when ____ is equipped, turn this switch on that changes some value, and if it's unequipped then the switch is off, and the value is at default.

 

[ZServ]

I'll see if anyone knows more than I do, but whenever I have items that are supposed to do something when equipped, usually I just use a switch so that when ____ is equipped, turn this switch on that changes some value, and if it's unequipped then the switch is off, and the value is at default.

So run a parallel process checking for that? Seems messy :<

In other news, I was using switches to control my cutscenes and I think I'm gonna move to a single variable to clean up a little bit. Time to make a backup.

Edit: Oh, and if anyone knows Ruby enough to rewrite Yanfly's battle engine to be mouse friendly, hit me up. Otherwise there will be a slight irritant when it comes to that due to my own inadequacy.

 

[Capra]

So I'm still in the writing/planning phase of development (need to get my ass in gear), but I just needed to ask people familiar with RM whether some things are even feasible without heavy coding:

1) Is there a fairly easy way to make a "lost woods" style area where the background music gets louder on one side of the map than the others?

2) How hard will it be to implement a choice system that carries through to the endgame and affects the ending credits (a la Fallout)? It would be based entirely on unavoidable dialogue choices... I'm already planning on implementing special untrashable items and other changes to correspond to these choices. Perhaps checking whether those things are currently in the player's inventory or status is enough?

Also... To go with my first question... I still need music. Would any of you talented composers be willing to correspond with me? I'm not sure how many tracks I would need in total. Ideally around 15, but I can crunch that down to probably about 7 general purpose tracks if I need to.

My aim for the soundtrack is to have a nice variety. I have a few parts in mind that really need to have a certain sound, but my plan is for it to be more freeform, less traditional... Something like Earthbound's soundtrack (to give you an idea, Mother 1 and Space Funeral are two of my main inspirations for this game). The battle theme doesn't have to sound like a traditional battle theme, dungeons do not (and in fact probably shouldn't) sound like traditional dungeon tracks... The game itself will be styled after NES RPGs like Mother, but doesn't necessarily have to sound like an NES game so I'm not worried about limiting the OST to Famitracker chiptunes. Really any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[ZServ]

1) Is there a fairly easy way to make a "lost woods" style area where the background music gets louder on one side of the map than the others?

2) How hard will it be to implement a choice system that carries through to the endgame and affects the ending credits (a la Fallout)? It would be based entirely on unavoidable dialogue choices... I'm already planning on implementing special untrashable items and other changes to correspond to these choices. Perhaps checking whether those things are currently in the player's inventory or status is enough?

1) I'd imagine so. I PERSONALLY don't know but am also interested in this.

2) Actually fairly easy. So long as you have an idea of what the dialogue tree should be, having that isn't difficult since the "events" in the game can be made to only activate under certain circumstances, allowing for as many different combinations as you want. Again, the hard part would be "is this a big enough change that it's actually worth the effort" since each ending roughly doubles the amount of effort needed.

 

[Copons]

1) Is there a fairly easy way to make a "lost woods" style area where the background music gets louder on one side of the map than the others?

There definitely is an event that plays a BGM at a given volume level, but I don't know how it behaves if you run it over an already playing BGM.
Does it increase volume? Does it do it but the BGM starts again from the beginning? Does it play the new BGM on top of the previous one? Does it replaces the previous BGM?
Dunno, but it should be super easy to test (I'm currently not on the PC with RPGM installed).

 

[timetokill]

Sooo... anybody know which Parallax mapping solution is best?

 

[esterk]

So I'm still in the writing/planning phase of development (need to get my ass in gear), but I just needed to ask people familiar with RM whether some things are even feasible without heavy coding:

1) Is there a fairly easy way to make a "lost woods" style area where the background music gets louder on one side of the map than the others?

2) How hard will it be to implement a choice system that carries through to the endgame and affects the ending credits (a la Fallout)? It would be based entirely on unavoidable dialogue choices... I'm already planning on implementing special untrashable items and other changes to correspond to these choices. Perhaps checking whether those things are currently in the player's inventory or status is enough?

Also... To go with my first question... I still need music. Would any of you talented composers be willing to correspond with me? I'm not sure how many tracks I would need in total. Ideally around 15, but I can crunch that down to probably about 7 general purpose tracks if I need to.

My aim for the soundtrack is to have a nice variety. I have a few parts in mind that really need to have a certain sound, but my plan is for it to be more freeform, less traditional... Something like Earthbound's soundtrack (to give you an idea, Mother 1 and Space Funeral are two of my main inspirations for this game). The battle theme doesn't have to sound like a traditional battle theme, dungeons do not (and in fact probably shouldn't) sound like traditional dungeon tracks... The game itself will be styled after NES RPGs like Mother, but doesn't necessarily have to sound like an NES game so I'm not worried about limiting the OST to Famitracker chiptunes. Really any help would be greatly appreciated.

Choice systems are easy, you can even just have switches and such activate and then have the end event check which are active to decide what needing is shown. I'm personally implementing a karma system in my game and just having be end event check to see the players karma to determine the ending.

 

[hitsugi]

Quick question regarding sprites - VX Ace seems to have characters that are.. a little too stubby. How well does it handle custom sprite sheets? And.. namely, taller sprites?

 

[Aquamarine]

Quick question regarding sprites - VX Ace seems to have characters that are.. a little too stubby. How well does it handle custom sprite sheets? And.. namely, taller sprites?

Pretty well, honestly.

I actually ported over RPG Maker XP sprites because I can't stand the stupid chibi look of VX Ace default sprites, and I had to do a bit of manipulation in Photoshop but it ended up working great.

 

[AliceAbstract]

Quick question regarding sprites - VX Ace seems to have characters that are.. a little too stubby. How well does it handle custom sprite sheets? And.. namely, taller sprites?

As long as you are still okay with 4 directions and 3 frames, the engine accepts custom sprites remarkably well. If you want it to recognize a sprite sheet with an ‘unusual’ sized sprite, append ! in front of it’s name (like “!Hero” - don’t forget to append a $ too if you are using only one sprite per sheet instead of eight!)

They’ll still operate based on the 32 x 32 grid, but you shouldn't run into a problem if you're just going taller.

The XP sprites are taller and can be used easily enough (just trim off that extra frame), and there are some custom bases around the community that make taller or more realistically proportioned characters. But the further away from the default you go, the less pre-made resources you’ll find.

 

[Capra]

Quick question regarding sprites - VX Ace seems to have characters that are.. a little too stubby. How well does it handle custom sprite sheets? And.. namely, taller sprites?

I'm using character sheets composed of 32 x 64 sprites, and in the few tests I've done so far they seem to work perfectly.

 

[HP_Wuvcraft]

I started over, making the overworld the main map and just a few areas, since the game in itself is just loop gameplay after the tutorial.

 

[SixMachine]

Was originally working on a modded ARPG engine, but it isn't feeling right.. and after seeing some of the finest examples ever created in RPG Maker (which still didn't feel right to me), I don't feel it's a worthy investment of my time to push it. I'm going to go a more traditional route, but maintain 8-way movement.

Also going back to the drawing board. I want the ideas out on paper because my brain gets scrambled up REAL quick.

I tried the same. I went through a few, even one that used pixel-by-pixel movement (this makes it take real long to load on large maps because it needs to recalculate and map them), but I think I want to try ARPG another time. Though having a script to handle diagonal movement makes the game feel much better. Even though you just are moving to the diagonal tile, it definitely feels great because it gives the character a greater range of motion.

This is also fun to play around with, try some of these if you guys want. It's scripts that other users have made that you can play around with. There are some for Active Time Battle Systems and even an input combo system like Xenogears (though first person battle still. If you want to combine it with the profile style battle, that would take quite a bit of work since you need to make animations for the sprites and what not for their abilities).

http://rpgmaker.net/scripts/rmvxace/battlesystems/

 

[HP_Wuvcraft]

Got around my problem.

I simply put the event on the GROUND next to the NPC, and set it to Self-Switch ON after the Event took place.

 

[chris-013]

Speaking of music, here's some tracks I have which I am not going to use for anything really, not all of them are fantastic and some were songs I did for practice, but enabling download on all of them, and you guys can feel free to use any of them for your projects if you want them.

...

Echo Ruin Techno - Sort of wistle-like Techno sound that's a bit more music-like

I really like your music, the Echo Ruin Techno feel a lot like dungeon of the endless !

 

[originalself]

Neat software. I have finished my world map, intro map, and started my main city. Character hub is handy as well. Designed a sprite set and face quickly.

 

[ZServ]

Destiny alpha is determined to stop any and all progress on this game. But that's okay. I'll just have to make sure I'm done before beta.

 

[DAREALGUMMY]

E3 basically stopped me from doing anything this week but when my Internet just died for two days, I got a lot of work in. I still haven't started any characters or battle systems yet though. I've been focusing on areas and small things for now.

Question, I for the life of me cannot get the conditional branch of having a character look in a certain position to activate a chest or other things to work. Can someone tell me step by step? Is there a specific place I must set it to work?

 

[ZServ]

E3 basically stopped me from doing anything this week but when my Internet just died for two days, I got a lot of work in. I still haven't started any characters or battle systems yet though. I've been focusing on areas and small things for now.

Question, I for the life of me cannot get the conditional branch of having a character look in a certain position to activate a chest or other things to work. Can someone tell me step by step? Is there a specific place I must set it to work?

3rd tab. "Character ___ is facing ___." Player, then your direction. Then just make sure your actual opening part of the event is within the conditional branch and not elsewhere.

 

[legacyzero]

Is it ok to stream our work??

www.twitch.tv/legacyzero

 

[Mr. RHC]

Woohooo, legacyzero, watching your drawing live, keep up the good work!! <3