RPG Maker: Hallway of Hindrance

Posted: 2-23-17

It’s been a while since our last Dev Blog update, but I promise that we are still working on setting the foundation and getting the Nefol game officially started! Some of this is a re-learning process as I haven’t personally used the RPG Maker system to create events and scenes in well over 10 years. So, I’m having to blow off some cobwebs.

Last weekend, Syn and I sat down and scripted out our introduction scene, which is slightly different from the one you might remember from the written version. Once it was scripted, I was eager to teach myself some event coding.

Hallway of Hindrance

So. In this scene, the idea was that Jin and Zento are walking down a hallway. Snippets of story narration appear in the background. There’s a storm brewing, and I wanted rain and sound effects for that. As the heroes make their way down the hall, I wanted enemies (Marked) to rush out at them menacingly, but the two heroes retaliate by knocking them back out of their way with ease. Then, at the end of the hall, there would be a boss fight.

Sounds like that should be something quick and easy to script for, doesn’t it? I thought so, too. Only, it took me the better of 4-5 hours to debug the process and figure out why events just weren’t doing what I was trying to make them do.

So, for about 3 minuets of game play, it took me a day to create!

It’s okay, though. The whole idea of opening up with something scripted like this was to re-learn the RPG Maker coding system. I’m pretty sure that in the future, creation will come much faster than this. I was just making rookie mistakes.

Switches and Scripts

Being super rusty with RPG Maker, I remembered there were things called switches. These work like a light switch – you turn them on or off, and they effect other events. For example, I was coding an automatic event that made Jin and Zento walk forward down the hall, but only when the switch was turned on.

The only problem was, the event was automatic, which means it continues to play over and over again… unless you turn the switch off. I’d forgotten all about that! So it was a long series of failure because Jin and Zento would never stop walking down the hallway as the event kept replaying itself! 

Yeah, I can laugh at it now, but back then, I was mystified at what I did wrong! Finally, I realized I needed to turn the event switch off to stop the event, and when I did, things got a little better.

I also had to re-learn how one event can control other events on the screen. Once, I made a mistake and forgot to indicate a specific event ID, and it ended up turning Jin’s sprite into a Marked enemy sprite! 

Once I worked out the kinks in the scenario and got it to run the way I wanted, it was time for the boss fight. I’m not going to say much more about it because I want it to be a surprise, but I promise it has a good dose of Syn’s humor in it.

This also took some time to figure out because very specific things needed to happen during the fight. But I learned a whole lot, which was the point of working through the introduction as a test scenario. I know that I can take this into the next scene to hopefully speed up the process much, much faster.

Syn’s Work

In the meantime, Syn was researching snowy tiles and traditional nomadic tents for the camp that our heroes will eventually go to. She also made the Jin sprite that you see here using the in-game character creator.