[Starlight] Objectives and next moves... (Patreon)

i very nearly impulse-implemented win conditions/objectives before doing passive skills... it turns out that would have been a dire mistake. i was able to basically take the same framework i set up passive skills in and yeet it over to work for objectives too. 

so that's done, also, some other things.... like we have a menu for the battles now! 

all that stuff works. 

bookmarks are something that went easier than i expected them too. rpg maker doesn't have any kind of latent autosave or save-deleting function so i was a little suspect of that. fortunately i found an autosave plugin and was basically able to hack that into a working bookmark. some UI work to be done to support that yet but we can get to that later.

as for objectives:

icons are placeholders. the objectives themselves are more-or-less representative of what we're looking at for the demo. 

hey ame what's a mark?

so glad you asked, italics-tan! marks are an idea that i've been sitting on for...
*checks the release date of Fire Emblem Sacred Stones*
fifteen years?

ok, so anyone else ever think it was odd in that game that they build up valter as this like ultra creepy irredeemable scumbag and then when you kill him with eirika, the one he's mainly been creeping on, he just kind of dies and everyone moves on with their lives?
or how in the same chapter it doesn't matter whether or not you kill caellach with joshua even though he literally murdered his mother?

i always thought that was kind of weird.

so the Marks system is my way of addressing that. basically if there's an enemy boss (or heck, even an enemy not-boss) that a character really wants to go have it out with, the Marks objective will tell you, and also the character will get a bonus for landing the killing blow. the bonus will probably be like an extra item, or a free level up or something; we'll see. but it exists. 

as for the rest of the objectives system, the way that this works right now is that i can load a bunch of objectives into memory from an rpg maker event at the start of a battle, and it can check for those throughout. the objectives list the player sees can freely generate from that list, but i can also create hidden objectives. mostly those will just be used for game flow stuff rather than things the player needs to worry about, but i don't promise i won't do anything sneaky...
...anyway, all of that then triggers back into the same event in RPG Maker so i can just load all of the mid-battle cutscenes up in there freely. it should be pretty easy to work with!

so... that's it. i posted a bunch of stuff back in november listing out what major implementations would need to be done for the battle system to be... well, i don't want to say finished because there's still a lot of holes, a lot of polish, a lot of filling in to be done... but it fully exists, and that's what matters.
this was that list:

• Counter-attacks
• Parries
• Ranged Combat
• Critical Hits
• Unit Summary
• Win/Loss Conditions
• Item Usage
• Combat Forecast
• Combat Arts
• Passive Skills

...and now we're here.

so, what comes next?

basically, there are two things that are immediately on my radar:

• a message system 
• and a particle generator

let's get the second one out of the way first. if you're not familiar, a particle generator is basically a system that produces lots of small, semi-random graphics on demand. pokemon has used them for battle animations since fourth gen, and they're great for those and other effects. rpg maker does not have one built in, but there are some plug ins for it that i need to explore and see if anything of them are suitable for my purposes. it's entirely possible that they won't be-- in which case i'll just cross this one off the list for the demo at least. but if i can find a good, compatible generator, that will make several things much easier in my life.

the more important one is the message system.

but ame, doesn't rpg maker already have a message system built in? what's wrong with that?

well, italics-tan, you're right, it does, and technically speaking, nothing's wrong with it. but it is lacking some key features that i want to make sure we have on lock from the outset. the obvious ones are text skip, but also scene skip. i also want to make sure to get a text log in since a large part of the game will be VN-ish and that's basically standard for those now... fortunately, plugins for all of those things probably exist already.

in addition to those, however, there are some other things i want. for instance, i'm hoping to find something to make messages more malleable, so that i can display small snippets of conversation that NPCs might shout in the background, or that i can use to create a tooltip system to help players learn the game's layout and elements better. this is another case where, if i can't find something like that... fine. but it would be really great if i can.

finally, i'm hoping to modify the message system myself to make VN-style art a little easier to work with on screen. strictly speaking, i can do all of that through picture commands, and i actually have done just that with an old project when i was a teenager... but if i can set it up so that it handles any of that more automatically, it would speed up cutscene development time considerably. that would be nice. you'd never guess it from e19's development time, but we actually like not taking forever.

after i do those two things, i think i will feel content in finally adopting my usual development approach-- start at the beginning, and work my way forward one button press at a time. that's when the real fun is gonna begin. 

i'll keep y'all posted. bye for now
xoxoxo

[this post was written yesterday before remembering that i really ought to let folks know that there's testing going on discord rn. however, in the time since writing this post, i have found plugins for all of the message features sans the personal customizations and implemented a mostly-working particle generator
further research is required but the operation is well underway]