[Starlight] Message Generator and Particle Systems (Patreon)

ok so those are done.

look, particles:

easy fire graphics. this is just a default preset, but... still. very workable for a start. you can see i have some control over the Z priority as well which will be great. i don't always get that in this desolate world.

it also works on the title screen, battles and combat, which is basically everywhere i expect to need it. 

as you can see, it could snow in battles. and probably will. but not in the demo.
i could also make the snowflakes display on top of the battlers properly, but i didn't for this screenshot. so whoops.

anyway this was frankly way easier than i expected. 

i feel like i say that a lot.

messages!

this probably looks simple. and in a simple world, it would be. but this is not a simple world, it is rpg maker, and in order to make this work in a meaningfully convenient yet aesthetically pleasing way i am using no fewer than five third party plug-ins and some personal modifications in the above screenshots.
...but that works fine as far as i know right now, so, that's ok.
basically:
- one to add the name tag
- one to add controls for character-specific stuff
- one to make a macro out of those controls so that i don't have to type a bunch of junk in each message
- one to adjust the positioning of the message as i want
- and one to display the message frame

...funny thing about the message frame. as far as RPG Maker knows, it's actually a face set. the plug in takes face cut-ins like these:

...which the engine supports natively, and automatically turns them into busts that display over the message like this:

only instead of a bust, i've told it to display a message frame. this saves me the trouble of having to manually display the message frame through event commands each time i load a message and instead hacks it right into the normal processing.

not having native face/bust support is no loss to me either, since it would normally display only one character's art per message. but i'd like scenes to be able to operate more like the GBA/3DS Fire Emblems do, with multiple characters onscreen, appearing to look at and talk to each other. so how do we handle those?

normally, we could just use picture commands. but, that's kind of a pain because each time i want to do anything with one i have to manually specify the exact coordinates (with no inherent ability to figure out where it's already at), manually fade it in separate from showing it, blahblahblah. doing all of that once is super easy. but if i'm writing a lot of scenes and moving characters around a lot, it will slow down the speed at which i can make them.

so, i've made some custom shortcut commands to do all of that for me.

That is super simple stuff as far as the player sees, and frankly the fact that there's not a simpler way to handle it on the back-end is embarrassing. Nothing in the above gif could normally be done well with a single event command. I've boiled it down to one command for each motion. I also have preset positions I can quickly jump to so I don't have to bother with X-coordinates. That helps with visual consistency and development speed, but if I need to the coordinates and manual commands are still available for me to use. 

i recognize that i'm probably the only one who would be excited by this. this is fine.

Let's talk about some other features that I mentioned I wanted:

Text skip is one. I didn't take a gif of it, but it is so in.
Cut-scene skip: 

that bar can and will be prettied-up.

stand-alone messages for NPCs or tooltips or something:

heaven style:

and finally, message backlog: 

that can be prettied up somewhere down the line too, but it's probably fine for the demo.

since doing this i've also taken the liberty of plotting out a much more thorough scoreboard-esque list of everything that needs to be done between now and testing for this demo.
there's a lot.
but it's finite.
and that matters so much to me right now.

i'll post that in a few days after i've had some more time to think over it and make sure i'm not missing anything. but hopefully after doing so all of us can feel a little bit better about being in this horrible going-on-two-years-without-a-major-release void. 

soon, and never soon enough