[CGMZ] Manual (Patreon)

Show a game manual in game to the player, letting them review mechanics or other useful information at any time. You can hide entries in the manual until the player comes across those mechanics during gameplay so your newer players do not get overwhelmed with information at the start of your game.

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Hi all, introducing [CGMZ] Manual!

This plugin creates a manual scene where you can show the player information about various mechanics in your game. Each manual entry can be customized with different display orders and different elements drawn to the window, and you can even show text on the side of images. Here is a gif of how it can look:

Building Entries

Guide entries are built using basic elements such as text paragraphs, images, headers, blank lines, and custom spaces. You can create as many of these elements as you want for your entry, and then drag and drop them in the order you want them to appear in using the Display Info plugin parameter. This Display Info parameter is on a per-entry basis, so each entry can have different elements or different element orders, allowing you to create any layout for any entry in a simple no-code format.

Here is a simple entry with no image elements:

And here is how a more complicated entry with images mixed alongside text can look:

On a side note, if you are interested in adding dungeon mechanics such as the Bomb, Hookshot, Lantern, or others described in these screenshots to your game, you can do so using [CGMZ] Dungeon Tools.

Discovering Entries

This plugin allows you to choose which entries are discovered at the start of the game. However, showing every mechanic to the player would overwhelm a new player right when they start the game. This plugin allows you to discover entries throughout your game as the mechanics they cover become relevant. Entries which are recently discovered that the player has not viewed get a New! marker text to let the player know they have not yet viewed that entry.

Quick Facts

✅ RPG Maker MZ✅ No obfuscation✅ No AI used at any point in the creation of this plugin

Support

Casper Gaming provides quick support to any user who needs it. You can leave a comment below with your question or issue, I try to check my Patreon at least once a day. For even quicker support, you can come into the Casper Gaming Discord and ask for help in the #support channel.

Roadmap

This plugin is already quite versatile, however I do have some planned additions for future updates including in no particular order:

Categories for entries

Additional guide elements

Option to select an entry automatically when scene is called

Casper Gaming plugins are made better through community suggestions. I am always happy to hear any features you'd like to see added that I may not have thought of already. Please leave any suggestions you have in the comments below, or in the #suggestions channel of the Casper Gaming Discord. I add all suggestions to my to-do list.

Happy RPG Making!

This version adds videos to the possible display items for your manual entries. You can use this to show a video of the mechanic, such as a bomb exploding a wall open. Videos will loop and have no volume, so the behavior will be similar to that of a gif. When setting up your video, please be sure to provide the width/height of your video as the plugin will need that to determine how much space to reserve for the video. See below gif for how it can look:

Similar options exist for videos that exist for images, such as block or inline mode and alignment.

This version adds an integration with [CGMZ] Toast Manager so you can now show a toast window when a manual entry is discovered. This includes a toast parameter for each manual entry if you want specific entries to have their own toasts, or a fallback discover toast parameter which will be used if the manual entry does not have a toast set up.

This update also fixes the crash you would get if you did not set up your manual entries after Alpha R2 when the new video parameters were added.

This version adds the line display item, which is similar to the header lines but just a line with no text, in case you ever want to draw a static line in your manual entry.

This update also added the Name as an option in Display Info. Previously it always drew the manual entry name at the top of the display window, and now it is optional. A bug was fixed with right and center aligned images when the image was larger than the window width. Integration parameters were organized to be more clear which plugin the integration belongs to.