5 tricks used behind the scenes in the new intro (Patreon)

so you all saw the first version of the video when i put it up to you privately-- and the one above is a different version from the feedback based off the first which was posted publicly. today i'm going to talk about a few of the silly work arounds that the intro uses to come together like this. 

#1- From the moment the player chooses their character, the character is actually standing behind the picture of the ticket.

If the ticket weren't there, they'd be in plain view out of sight. However, Picture commands always display on the front of the screen which means in order to not have the player pop into existence all I had to do was keep them centered under the ticket. Incidentally the previous intro did this too where the background of in-game me talking about Reborn was also a picture, though that one took up the full screen. 

#2- The row of player options that appears at the bottom are normal events-- which means the player has to be perfectly positioned over them. 

In the previous intro the Starting Position (where the player is when new game is loaded) didnt matter at all because of the full screen being covered by the picture. In this case I wanted to use Events to display the full row of players, so I had to make the Starting position match a place where those events would be just in view of the game's normal camera angle, but where the player could still be hidden below the ticket (and without the ticket hiding the player events!) I had to adjust the open space a couple times in order to get this right. 

#3- The background is a panorama-- until it's not.

At first, the black and grey stripes are set on the map as a panorama. I had to do this in order to get it to display behind the player events and not cover them up. I said before the player character is just visibly standing behind the ticket, so how is it that we can't see the player when the ticket fades away? Well, that's because just before the ticket picture vanishes, I switch the panorama bg to a fog bg. You can see the transition where the stripes fade to a different positioning if you look closely at 1:23, but it was smooth enough that I didnt mind. So, we go from a panorama to a fog to show or hide the player/events when we need to, but there's another reason too. I knew I wanted the background to scroll at the end, and be like mini-traintracks, but panoramas actually dont scroll in this version of RPG Maker-- whereas fogs do. So I had to do that anyway, which is good since there are easier ways of hiding the player, for instance in a case like below.
By the way speeding up those tracks over time was such a pain lol look at this

thats not even all of it-- unfortunately i have to do that kind of thing several times during this episode. 

#4- The player is actually running underneath the train in the desert. 

Insert Bethesda joke here. When on the desert map we just turn the player to have 0 opacity and have them run along the same path as the train. I could achieve the same result without the game crashing due to the event trying to leave the playing field by using a map scroll command, but this is easier when working with the move route.
Maybe it's also interesting to note that I had the train go down the maximum single stretch of vertical track in the whole desert right here-- any more and it would've come to a corner and although we have four directional train facings we dont have diagonal sprites for making those turns and I certainly dont care to make them. 

#5- Inside the train, some of the train parts are actually events too. 

These two events display the normal train tiles on top of the existing ones.  It's a minor fix to some poor planning on my part when making this tile set, but it gets the job done-- mostly. So RPG Maker has three layers to work with- lower middle upper. Referring to the spots those events are on-- the lower layer is the floor tile. The middle layer is the back side of the bench that an event can sit on. The upper layer is the leg of the table. However I needed one more tile there-- the top of the bench that would display over the back of the event sitting down there. So we use the event to patch it over.
Incidentally someone pointed out that in the video above, that caused a bug where Ari's head gets clipped off by the tile left of Kuro. Normally I would fix this by just setting Ari to always display on top, but that also means she would actually display on top of the wall light in front of/above her. So I had to scoot her over.
Also, it's not like those two spots are the only ones that have this issue, but they are the only ones where events actually sit so I only need to fix those. If an event were to sit on the back of a bench in front of any other table in this map, the tile priority would still display improperly since there was no reason for me to fix those.