Welcome to Gaia! ::

I didn't see anything on it, so I thought that anyone with RPGMakerVXAce
trouble could use this little tutorial on minor things that can prove useful in a
newbs first adventure.

If you are offended by any musical choices you encounter throughout my
tutorials or in the games you may end up downloading through my influence
I am not responsible for the end result; be it the corruption of your
innocent ears or your parent's wrath, and or your opinion of my person,
I am not held accountable for any of your problems. Happy gaming!

Table of Contents
Table of Contents

♫ Updates throughout the tutorial.
♪ Conditional Branches and how they work.
♫ Choices and what you can do with them.
♪ Books, creating working books, maps, and other.
♫ Music Box.
♪ How to make a "Pick Gender" option.
♫ Pirate's favourite scripts, sources and extra tidbits.

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U P D A T E S

♪ (2013, 9th of February) Looking for people interested in making a
VXAce "School" (see: VX School) collaboration project. For details
please PM me. :3
♫ (2013, 8th of February) A celebratory toast to things getting back on
track! /lifts glass/
♪ (2013, 8th of February) Example Game re-uploaded through a new
website, updated, and now features new tutorials.
♫ (2013, 26th of January) Currently revising the Choices section.
♪ (2013, 26th of January) Gender Picking tutorial added.
♫ (2013, 26th of January) "Pirate's Favourite Recs" now includes sources,
toolkits, and blog recs. Cheers!
♪ (2013, 26th of January) Updated example game re-uploaded. No music so
you can be the master of what you listen to with your short experience. More
about the game in the Library Section.
♫ (2013, 25th of January) Whoops! Silly me forgot to compress the Example
Game to be a playable file outside of RPGMaker. Re-uploading and updating
the file. Another update will announce when it's back up and running!


__________________________________________________________

C O N D I T I O N A L | B R A N C H E S

A Conditional What?
Conditional Branches are quite versatile and easy to use. Like switches,
they're a part of event activation. Both switches and Condition Branches will
run throughout the game.

Take this short scene below for example. In the first part you can see that I
do not have any partners or team mates to back me up. When I address the
animal, it cries and that is the end of that. Afterwards I have the green haired
girl trailing after me. When I talk to the kitty again, there is now something
new to read.


Crazy stuff, right? That's the power of Conditional Branches. Later on you
could remove the girl from my team, come back, and it will act the same
as before. The game's play won't be effected anyway either unless
you choose for it to be. In this case, if she's ever on my team again the
branch will re-activate. Switches usually are meant to remain turned on,
but if you have a Conditional Branch you only have to worry about event
activation as it's always fool-proof.

Lame, I don't have conversation in my RPGs, I fight!
These Conditional Branches can be used for more than just making
cute cut scenes. They also have a tendency to be jam-packed with action!
Conditional branches have the same ability to create new players or
treasures, boss encounters, etcetera etcetera, as switches and variables.
You can do just about anything with a Conditional branch (within reason).
Like I said, versatile!

But I tried doing this thing and it just didn't work!
Chances are you didn't trigger the conditional branch.
If you don't have an oil lamp in your inventory, how can you expect
the cave to brighten? If you don't activate the right switch, how will
the puzzle door open? If you're looking for random events, you're
going to have to realise now, nothing is ever random. Variables that
are heightened will make your chances of getting (x) bigger and (y)
smaller, and that's not random despite the illusion you're giving
the player.

Ragniirok did an amazing job explaing conditional switches which I'm going
to touch on lightly. Go to his tutorial for the awesomeness. * A*

B O O K S & L I B R A R Y | F U N C T I O N S
Section One

This one is a bit lengthy, so prepare for a LOT of text, because I am not
going to give you script but rather a manual walk-through of preset functions
to create something similar to a library system.

I'm writing all of this at some unGodly hours (like everything else), so bear
with me here. Let's start with the basics, you need a library or at the very
least a book shelf. If you're going to make a check out system, there are
going to be many more steps, so it will be towards the end of the tutorial. For
now, let's focus on the basics of books.

When you have a book or library, set an event. This event is going to be the
trigger to a common event, reading a book.

The first thing you would want to do is determine your trigger, is it an answer
to a question, picking up an object, accessing it through your inventory?

Outer Influence and Access:
The first thing I do to make my books look good is I make
the pages. That's right, there's no other way around it. There's
probably some intense and incredible script out there that's super
complicated and long and makes the text boxes incredibly big
but I haven't seen it, so I use images instead.

Open up notepad or whatever program you're using and write out your
text, then open up paint. You're going to want to make a background that
looks like a page, or a ruin, or whatever your text is going to be on. (I
personally used images off of the internet for a background but you can make
your own.) Then you're going to put the text on top of the background as save
your work. From here, open up RPGMaker, we're going to get into the more
complicated bits.

For starters, I want to point out, that the size of your text DOES matter. If it's
too small, no one can read it, if it's too big you're going to be using more
pages which can seriously slow your game down without an anti-lag script. It
can take anywhere from ten minutes to two hours to find that happy medium,
so you really need to be prepared to put some time into this project.

Once you're in RPGMaker, make an event on your bookcase/book/object
/whatever.

Then set it to trigger a common event. From here you're going to open up the
Common Event tab in the Database. For a nicer effect, make the sides of
your picture a solid colour so you can set it as transparent.


If you look closely, there's an empty, transparent text box that appears after
every image, that way the page won't immediately switch to the next. This
gives the illusion of turning the page and allows your reader to linger on each
one for however long they please.

The next step here is to adjust your image so it looks centered and in focus.
You don't want to have all the images randomly strewn about. For me, I use
the constants 270, 210 on Center. Then toggle the zoom function.
Remember: if it's hard to see the text, it's not the program, it's your
image. Go back and play with the fonts and sizes. I've found that Times New
Roman, 12, Bold is mediocre, as you can read it fairly well. Though some
letters tend to cut off.

Access from your Inventory:

Time to get tricky.

Now, say you want to take this book with you because you like the Field
Music better than the music indoors, or it's also a key item, etcetera. The
obvious thing to do is create a new inventory item. A few tweaks to it and it's
perfect for reading on the go. Start by creating a new slot or hitting the
'delete' key on a preexisting one. From here, name your book, add an icon
and select 'no' on consume if you don't want it to disappear after being read.
If you DO want your books to disappear leave Yes on CONSUME on and you
can pick a snappy animation effect to go along with it just beneath that. Now,
something important here: You MUST Select "Only From Menu" if you want
this item to work as a book and a book alone. As a battle item, you must
select "Only From Battle" and for both "Always", under occasion.

In the end, your item should look something like this:


In the last two images, I demonstrated how you would activate the Common
Event through your inventory. So now your book should work like the
example below.



B O O K | S H R E D D E R S & L A B E L S
Section Two

Now, before I jump into it, I want to acknowledge that the choices function I'm
about to present to you SHOULD BE in the choices section. SHOULD BE
but isn't. So please, dry those tears, it's all going to work out in the end.

Book Shredders and Area Limitation Reading is very simple. You can set up
your shredder one of two ways:
1) Individually shred each book.
2) Shred all books.

Create an object that will act as your waste disposal unit. I'll use a little
dragon.


To make the book shredder destroy all books make sure that when you
select the option to get rid of you books, it actually erases each object.


To make a manual shredder, just add the options.


Now, I want to mention labels. In the Above image you can see that the four options are:
♫ THE BEST BOOK EVAR
♪ A Poem
♫ Another Book
♪ More

When you select More it leads to a new set of choices, but the last choice,
'Back' is quite obviously blank. This is where labels come in.

With Back, you can open up all sorts of possibilities, it can be used near
anywhere but you'll especially see it when dealing with multiple choices.
Why should you exit the conversation to see the choice options again when
you can just go BACK?


This is what it will do:


This is a simplified example:


A R E A | L I M I T A T I O N & T H E | E X A M P L E | G A M E
Section Three

Area limitation reading, is quite simply, a barricade. Is that punk running out
MY library with a book in his hands? I don't think so. There are multiple ways
to set up an area limitation, or pass for it, but I find the most simple method
is a library card with an ID on it. If I had the patience, I'd even demonstrate
how a time system can be used to penalize an individual who has had a
book out longer than however many days. But I don't have the patience and
all of you are pretty smart so I'm sure you could figure it out.

Here is a little sample game I've made that you can use to help get a general
idea of the functions used to create a library and a library with limitation.
It has two parts which are required to play it.
Example Game
Part One Part Two
This only works on VXAce! So I've included the RTP to let it function properly.

If you're against a download (totally understandable) and even if you want a
little extra information in case a function seems to go over your head
(happens to me all the time) the picture tutorial is below. emotion_bigheart

Before we jump into pictures, here are the functions of the game:
♪ Includes a Library with an example of Area Limitation
♫ While there are no page-turning books (yet!) an operable map is attainable
through the Troll in the Directory.
♪ A VERY simple puzzle is on the Green Island (North) in
the Forgotten Tower. I would have made it a bigger challenge but I decided to
save that for later when I can put some time into it.
♫ Music from Schlomo, compressed, and as tutorialish as possible. I
triple scanned it, so there's no viruses or any of that rot. Enjoy my pretties~!
/witch cackle

To Come:
♪ A more complex puzzle. Interactive books as shown in the tutorial above.
♫ A new environment!

Feel free to pick it apart with the programme itself if you want, otherwise the
details will be below waiting. The music is NOT mine, it's by Schlomo. The
tiles are from "Mack's Real Tileset" and the fish character in the opening can
be found at the same site as Mack's Tileset (links are in the Rec section).
The text is all for lulz, so don't take anything outside of tutorials too seriously.
It's not hidden code or internet slang just something to make you smile. yum_puddi

P I C K I N G | G E N D E R S

This is my way of creating a gender option in your game.

Start out by opening your Database and going to Actors.
Spruce up two out of the lot making them male and female. From
here you can create an "invisible" character to be your starter party.

Now, at the start of your game, set an event that will asked
The Big Question. With the invisible character as your party member
open up and automatic conditional branch with your introduction
and the question in it (this can be expanded to race among other
things, but it can heavily slow down your game so keep in mind
how much customization you want to include and what you can
afford to drop.)

Once the variable (boy, girl, ect) has been chosen, enter into the
menu and "erase" the character, or delete them from the party
while inserting the selected character in its place.

Easy as pie, right? Now, let's get a bit more challenging.

What happens when you want to name your character?
Obviously this is where "Input Name Processing" comes in.
From here set a new or continue the conditional branch already in
place selecting your current actor as the variable. To make sure
the name is acknowledged correctly in conversation, you're going to
need to input "[n]1" in place of the name.

Yes, you will still need to set a pre for "if character [x] is in
party" to trigger the correct name. This way you're setting
the script to address the player's chosen name. Pretty cool,
right?

You see, the number "1" is the FIRST character in your actor
sheet. So all you need to do is remember to change the
number for male or female to make the game work.

This tactic will help conversations flow and make the game
more personalized. Now you don't have to worry about masculine
or feminine terms getting in the way because they've been separated!
Yaaaaay~

(Pictures will be added later. emotion_bigheart )