LogFAQs > #946269881

PK_Spam posted...

Oh... man... I was working on a detailed cutscene for my RPG Maker game. 3 minute scene. Tips.

I looked up from my screen and it had been 3 hours >_>

Nice, it be like that sometimes. Especially if you test movement a lot. After you get more used to it, you probably won't bother testing movement till the end since it doesn't effect anything else so you can fix it all in a row although sometimes I do test early just to get a feel for how it actually feels to see the scene.

Be very aware of the checkbox in a moveroute that says "wait for completion" and "skip if cannot move".

If you want 2 characters to move at the same time for instance, you put the 1st moveroute without checking wait for completion (which should be the shorter one timewise if they aren't the same duration) and then the 2nd one you click wait for completion. That way the first will be initiated and then the event will immediately move (same frame) to the next thing, which will be the 2nd moveroute, then it will wait for that one to finish before moving on.

Skip if cannot move is a way to not break your game, but at the expense of potentially messing up your scene. If it's not checked and your character tries to move up, but something is in the way, the game will freeze. Sometimes this is good because you can immediately see exactly where the problem is and then go fix it. But if you have something like randomly moving NPCs in the background of the scene that may walk into the path you need to move on, skip if cannot move can allow it to not crash, but that means the moveroute won't end where you want it to. Could be worth it if there is some fringe case you don't want to program and exception for so players won't be stuck on a broken scene.

With speech boxes be aware there are text codes that will do stuff like bold things or insert the amount of currency you have or say a specific actors name which can be useful if you let the player name a character. There's also the dim and transparent backgrounds and multiple positionings for the text box which you can use as thought bubbles or narration pretty conveniently. I always use dim, bottom for inner thoughts and transparent, center for action narration (something like "suddenly the earth shook").

I advise creating a main quest variable that you use for scene control and then also make a side quest variable for side quests. This can make sure the player is where they are supposed to be and help you keep track of where you are at when looking back through scenes. Pages in an event will always choose the rightmost page that passes the checks so you can use that order your scenes.

That needs an example. Imagine you have a weapon shop you can interact with. You can set up a page with dialogue and a shop for when you first start the game. Then on the page to the right set the condition to main quest var >= 1. That 2nd page will be the page that triggers as soon as the main quest advances to 1. Then lets say later you want to change the shop again at a certain point to offer better weapons. Make a new page and make sure it's the right most page and set it's condition to main quest var >= 7. When the main quest reaches the spot where you set it to 7, all 3 pages conditions will be valid, so it will choose the right most page, in this case the one where it's >= 7. If you swap the 2nd and 3rd page, the >= 7 page will now be left of the >= 1 page. That means it will never activate because even when main quest == 7, 7 > 1 and that >= 1 page is to the right of it.

Hopefully that's easy enough to understand when you actually do it. Also self switches are super convenient for NPCs with dialogue that you don't want to repeat or for chests or any 1 time thing. Just have it do what you want on page 1 and at the end of page 1, set self switch A to ON and then page 2 is completely blank with the condition self switch A == On.

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