Creating Tiles Part 2

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Guide to Creating Tiles in RMVX-Ace Style
by Lunarea

Part 2: Perspective

In part 2 of Lunarea’s Creating Tiles tutorial, she is going to tell us all about the perspective used in RPG Maker VX Ace’s tilesets, a common perspective used in video games know as the Top Down Perspective.

Included in this tutorial is:

  • Discussion of what top down perspective is and how it is a combination of two real life perspectives used to create the illusion of depth in a 2D game.
  • How to draw some real life shapes in that perspective.
  • What steps that are needed to “rotate” a tile.

Read the full tutorial by downloading the PDF here!

Golden Week-End Sale!

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Golden Week is just kicking off in Japan which means a lot of people travelling, spending time with their families, and generally having a good time. Our Tokyo team will be enjoying Golden Week but we couldn’t let them have all the fun. We decided to set up a special Golden Week-End sale for you guys. From now until Monday at noon (PST) you can save 40% on any of our products. RPG Makers, Resource Packs, Games, you name it!

Creating Tiles Part 1

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Guide to Creating Tiles in RMVX-Ace Style
by Lunarea

Part 1: Tools

RMVX-Ace tiles are created through a process of digital painting. This process is different from traditional pixel art, both in terms of technique and in tool requirements.

We will go over the tools you will need to create tiles in this tutorial:

  • Art program with transparent background, brushes and ability to save in .png format (examples: Photoshop, GIMP)
  • A hard round brush and a soft round brush
  • A 32×32 pixel grid, created through art program settings or made manually
  • A mouse or a tablet

Take the time to get used to making fluid and uninterrupted lines with the mouse or tablet. Practice drawing curves as well as straight lines (see PDF for examples of shapes).

Read the full tutorial by downloading the PDF here!

Part 2 will cover RMVX-Ace’s perspective, object depth and object edges/outlines.

Tracking Time in Common Events

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Yo. Uncle Despain here, with my newest RPG Maker VX Ace tutorial. Last time around, we made a bank where the player is able to store and withdraw gold. A lot of people have been asking about adding interest, so today’s tutorial will explain a way to do that. And more!

What we’re going to learn today is how to track time in common events. It’s easier than you might imagine—in fact, it’s super simple. The important thing about the idea is what to do with it.

When you can track the passage of time, you can add a tremendous amount of interesting mechanics to your game. I mentioned interest for your bank. You can expand the same idea for all sorts of other things—growing plants for a farm/planting system, items that level up as time passes. A day/night system, or weather, or seasons. All of these mechanics are possible with a simple common event that allows the game to keep track of time.

So let’s take a look. This is the most basic way to accomplish the idea.

(click for full view)

Ridiculously easy, right? As simple as this event is, let’s take a moment to look at what it does.

You understand how common events work—we went over those in a previous tutorial. So we know that this event will continually run in the background while the player is exploring your game world.

Every ten seconds, this event increases a variable. In this example, the variable is called “Hours”, but it can be anything you want. Don’t feel the need to measure time in longer “hours”—even if that’s what you name your variable, the player doesn’t see it. We’re just tracking time, and I smaller increments allows for more accurate tracking. You’ll see that, in this example, we wait ten seconds before an “hour” passes.

Of course, that amount of time can be changed—you might want to wait a minute, or more. All you’ve got to do is add more wait commands. Remember that one frame is one sixtieth of a second, so a sixty-frame wait will be about one second.

This is the only most basic way of tracking time. You might want to add a little more depth to the idea, so let’s consider tracking minutes and hours together.

This version uses two variables. If you understand conditional branches, it’s pretty straightforward. Every sixty frames (every second), the event goes into a conditional branch. If sixty minutes have passed, it adds to the hour variable and resets the minute counter. If not, it adds a minute. In this version, a “minute” passes every second, and an hour passes every sixty seconds. You might want to change that for your game—it’s just a matter of changing the number in the conditional branch, or changing the wait commands.

That’s all it takes to track time in your game. The parallel process common event will continually loop in the background of your game. Remember that you can turn it off with its Condition Switch, so you can make sure that time doesn’t pass when your player is in a cutscene. Just remember to turn it back on afterwards.

“Sure, that’s cool”, you say. “But what do I do with it?”

In my next tutorial, we’ll dive a little deeper. We’ll make a simple day/night system, and we’ll add interest to our bank account every day that passes. Stay tuned. And happy game making. :)

The RPG Maker Marriage Proposal

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RPG Maker is changing lives. Redditor Marchaka proposed to his new fiancé by creating a game in RPG Maker VX Ace.

Michelle’s Quest is a fun, short game in the classic Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest style that RPG fans love. It has about four hours of gameplay. Personal touches like the censored snake (Michele hates snakes), inside jokes, and plenty of humorous video game references give Michele’s Quest a unique charm. The game led her to four real-life keys that opened a locked chest, and when she opened it, Marchaka appeared behind her and popped the question. No wonder she said “yes” to such an unforgettable experience.

The best part? How easy it was to make the game! Michele’s Quest wouldn’t have been possible without RPG Maker VX Ace. Marchaka created the entire game in less than a week, but says that “it would have taken years” without RPG Maker.

Marchaka has been kind enough to share his game online. You can download Michele’s Quest here.

Whether you have a special someone to propose to, or you want to craft your own world and adventure, RPG Maker VX Ace is the perfect tool. Marchaka said it himself: “You don’t need to know any programming languages to make a game”. Have an idea? Dive right in!

Create your own game with RPG Maker VX Ace. Buy it today for only $69.99.

Creating a Bank

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Howdy! Your friend Despain here, with another RPG Maker VX Ace tutorial. Today, we’re going to be using variables and conditional branches to create a simple bank event. The player will be able to check his current balance, or deposit or withdraw money. A banking system like this can add depth to your game, especially if you want to encourage your player to manage his finances.

This is what the event will look like when we are done with it:

(click the image for a full view)

This event is going to use three variables. You can create them with the Control Variables event command, under the Game Progression category on the first page of event commands. Continue reading →

ReStaff March 2013 Release

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Welcome everyone to the March 2013 ReStaff Release!
This month is pretty good as well with all the music!

Thanks to our lovely Guest Contributors and ReStaffers,
for making this month a success!

Information about Commercial usage can be found here.
If you want to be a Guest Contributor, go here!

 We also don’t allow the resources to be redistributed anywhere else.
If you want to share it, please direct them here instead!
Thank you for your patronage.

Continue reading →

Thinking Outside the Box: Challenge 2

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So, last time we cheated the autotile system to give us tile and a half high walls. Are you ready for the second challenge?

Challenge 2 FIGHT!

For this challenge I’m going to give you an enemy, two skills, and a modified state to use.

The enemy!

The skills!

This skill targets 3 random enemies and induces deep sleep 75% of the time on each enemy.

This skill drains hp from all enemies equal to the casters magic attack * 4 – the targets magic defense * 2, but ONLY works if the target is affected by the state Deep Sleep (make sure the number in bstate?(*) is the same as Deep Sleep’s state number in the database). Otherwise it does 0 damage. This uses a custom damage formula based on Fomar’s excellent custom damage formula tutorial to accomplish this.

And this is the State:

Deep Sleep is identical to sleep with the exception that it is only removed by damage 50% of the time.

Ok, now that we have all the materials… what is the challenge?!

Description: You have these skills, but you will notice I didn’t show you the Action Patterns of the Shades. Your job is this: Create a troop containing 2 shades. Now make it so that when all the player characters are awake, the shades will ONLY use Sleep Breath, BUT if at least one of the player characters is under the influence of Deep Sleep, the shades will use Sleep Breath and Dream Feed equally.

Restrictions: No scripting.

You can use the comments here, or comment on the link from our Facebook page to offer up solutions. GOOD LUCK!

Consistency – Keeping Your Game Smooth

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by Paul “Reynard Frost” Walker

If you’re a member of the RPG Maker community, you should be almost intimately familiar with the phrase “RTP”. The default graphics that come with each RPG Maker that we know and love. Sometimes it gets the job done, but other times it’s just not enough! We need a song that’s got a bit more fire to it, we need a priest with an afro, or a battler of a unicorn wielding a machete in its mouth. Whatever your need, sometimes we need to get out of our comfort zone and find new and better resources to make our game just that much better itself.

Yet are these resources better? Sure on their own that battler might look absolutely amazing, much like a bar of chocolate can be a delicious snack on its own. Yet throw that bar of chocolate into a plate of spaghetti… While some might enjoy the contrast in flavor, others will widen their eyes in surprise and react with, “Why is there chocolate in my marinara?”

This is where we get to the core of our topic. Consistency. What is consistency? The dictionary describes it as, “Correspondence among related aspects; compatibility”. To put it simply, consistency is the act of making sure that nothing in your game feels out of place. If you’re making a bowl of spaghetti, then you’ll want to use the usual ingredients that make that classic dish so tasty. Yet what about that bar of chocolate you love to snack on? Chocolate in your ice cream is far more compatible than in the middle of your pasta! Yet I’m sure we’ve both had enough of the food metaphors, how does this apply to RPG Maker? Let’s discuss the two main types of resources and how you can keep work towards keeping them consistent with each other.

Graphics

Tilesets, character sets, battlers, etc. All of these graphics make up the pieces we need for the visual aspect of our game. To start, let’s take a peek at this screenshot of a battle scene I pulled randomly from Google:

Those player battlers look mighty well drawn don’t they? And that background? Even better! Why the two seem to go hand in hand! The similar color tones, the drawn or painted style. Like a page from a storybook brought to life, right? Well there does seem to be something out of place in this lovely shot… Those bees! Notice the difference not only in colors/brightness, but the actual drawn style? While the background and the player battlers are different styles of drawing, they at least blend well due to their colors. Not to mention a scenery and a character can be slightly different without being too jarring to the eye. But those monsters? Why they look like cartoony critters that belong on a saturday morning adventure show, not the comic book style epic that the player battlers would lead you to believe you’re playing. Now let’s take a look at something a bit more consistent in its art style!

Ghost of Aliens (2k3) Showing off an almost Earthbound style of art.

Here we have the player on the right and the enemies on the left in usual jRPG style. However, notice a difference between the art in the first example and this one? Well for starters, both the player and the enemies are drawn in a similar style. Sure the enemies are larger, as battlers often are, but they’re both drawn in a retro 16-bit style that has a matching style of color and shading. The two of them don’t look any more out of place than the other. The UI is also consistent with the art style above.

What’s the simplest way to make sure your graphics are consistent? Well to have them drawn custom for your project! Can’t draw? Don’t know any artists? Not a problem. If you want to borrow assets make sure that the two styles look compatible. (Only recommended for hobbyists, as ripping any graphics for a commercial endeavor will just get you into trouble). If you want to use the RTP, then I’d recommend picking up the RTP style art packs that are sold here at RPG Maker Web. If you’re strapped for cash, your best bet is to try your own hand at art. The beauty of RPG Maker is that you aren’t stuck with only Pixel Art. You can try hand drawn graphics, or make 3D images and use those instead! Just remember, keep them consistent. If you’re going to use 3D Battlers, make sure your characters are also 3D, as well as your environments. Want to mix and match? 3D Environments look good with 2D Sprites, or vice versa! (See: Ragnarok Online for the former, and Final Fantasy 7 for the latter.)

Art not your thing? Not sure where to start? Then look no farther than here on RPG Maker Web! There are plenty of tutorials available for the beginner artist to try their hand at their own custom assets. It will take time, and it won’t be easy, but it is possible. I myself didn’t know a thing about pixel art a year ago, and now I can put together some competent art assets. For example:

June 2012

January 2013

These two shots also show off a difference in consistency. Look at my combat in June, the numbers and health bars didn’t match the battlers at all, the backgrounds while pixelated, weren’t the same proportion as the battlers, and the menus are all transparent! Totally breaking the immersion of the game. The latter on the other hand, looks like something you would have played on the NES! (Or at least I hope it does). Notice how the characters and the battlers are both drawn in a simple, 8bit style. If I had taken some rips from Final Fantasy 7 and put them in there, imagine how awful THAT would look!

Tilesets being the main chunk of the RTP, aren’t as often mismatched as the battle system might be. No, the other chief culprit of mismatched assets is the message system! While those Kaduki facesets look nice, they’re a completely different style than the RTP facesets. Heck even the Samurai pack has drastically different face sets than the ones used in the basic RTP. Just keep in mind that if you’re going to use face sets, that you use the same style of face set throughout the game. Not only that, but make sure that what types of characters that get face sets is also consistent. If you give face sets to only key characters, like quest givers and the party, that’s great! But if you give a random villager or two a face set but nobody else, then it will just confuse the player! Yet that’s not all you need to keep in mind for consistency! Next, we’ll discuss the audio aspects of our game.

Audio

Man, Final Fantasy has a really great soundtrack doesn’t it? But how would it sound mashed up with the music from Deus Ex? Not that good right? Or how about a song from Final Fantasy 7 mixed with the combat music from the first Fire Emblem? Even worse, right? As it is with graphical assets, a piece of audio may be amazing on its own, but it has to blend well with the rest of the audio you’re using or it will just sound jarring to the player. If you want to use 8bit music, make sure that not only is the music 8bit, but your sound effects are as well! Want to use high def orchestral tracks? Make sure that the sound effects you use are high quality and modern as well. Yet the type of music you use is only one piece of the puzzle! You also need to keep audio levels in mind! What are audio levels? Well if you take a peek into the editor when you’re applying a piece of music or sound effect, you can also control the volume at which that piece of audio is played. Depending on how many different sources you’re pulling audio from, you may need to sample these by ear and mix and match volume levels. Does your world map sound fairly quiet and then you jump into a battle and you’re rushing for the volume control to turn it down before the blaring rock music destroys your ear drums? Well just slide down that volume slider in the editor so that your battle theme is around the same volume as your world map!

That bad boy right there can help you prevent an audio disaster.

Like face sets, voice acting is also something you want to keep consistent. Do you use simple grunts for key characters, but a long speech for a random quest giver? Seems quite out of place doesn’t it? If you give full or even partial voice acting for every single character in your game, that’s great! But make sure that [i]every[/i] single character gets their own voice! Only want key actors to have voice acting? That’s also great! But make sure that you don’t give a random bartender some voice over and neglect the other villagers in town who are forced to be silent! Keep it consistent!

Another example is with environment sounds. Do you have one or two chests that make a sound when opened, but all other chests remain completely silent? Out of place once again! Or do you have a cool sound effect that plays when one character joins your party, but no fanfare is heard when the rest of your party members join? Out of place!

In Closing

Keep in mind that we are making video games here! When a player is playing your game, you don’t want them to get snapped out of their immersion and get a frown on their face when they find out that you suddenly threw in a cameo from a character that is portrayed in a completely different art style than the rest of the characters in the game! As a homework assignment from me to you, take a look at the games you love and keep an eye out for how things match, how they blend together, how they look so consistent! Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

Paul Walker works as a quality assurance tester who has worked to help perfect games in series such as God of War and Uncharted (And Hannah Montana The Movie Game, but I’m sure he would rather forget that). When not working on games, he works on games, and is currently working on the game Ruins of Rydos using RPG Maker.

Password Input using Actor Names

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Yo, Despain here with my latest RPG Maker VX Ace tutorial. Today I’m going to show you how to create a password—and I’m not talking about the Input Number type of password. We’re going to be creating an event where the player can enter an actual text password, and we can do that by using the Name Input Processing event command.

The Name Input Processing command will call up a screen where the player can create a name for an actor. It’s mostly used to give the player the chance to make up new names for the heroes. But like most all event commands in RPG Maker VX Ace, it can be used for more than that.

The first thing you want to do is create a dummy actor in the database. This actor shouldn’t be used anywhere else in the game—he can’t join the party. Don’t worry about his graphics, class, features—the only thing we care about is his name.

Now that your dummy actor has been made, you can create your event. You’ll find the Name Input Processing command on page 3 of the event commands, under the Scene Control category.

Choose the dummy actor. For the sake of this example, I’ve named him PASSWORD. Note that the name of the actor will be displayed by default when the Name Input Processing screen appears in-game, so you might want to give this actor a blank name.

The max characters field should be easy to understand. When I use this command to create a password functionality, I always make sure that the amount of characters is equal to the length of the password. That way, it avoids potentially confusing the player.

The Name Input Processing command will change the selected actor’s name to whatever the player enters. Now, if we use a conditional branch, we can check that actor’s name. In this way, we are able to simulate a password function.

You’ll find the Conditional Branch event command on page 1 of the event commands, under the Flow Control category.

On page 2 of the Conditional Branch box, you’ll be able to check an actor, and you can check to see is he has a specific name. All you need to do is type the password into this box. The conditional branch will essentially read “if the player entered whatever as the password”.

Here’s something worth noting: the name field of the conditional branch is case-sensitive. That means that it cares if the player enters the proper capital letters. You can avoid this by using additional conditional branches in the “else” space, and check other instances of the password (for example, Hello, hello and HELLO). For the sake of the example, we’re going to keep it simple. The player will have to enter Hello in order to continue.

This is what my event looks like.

If the player enters the password correctly, the guard will tell the player that he can pass. Otherwise, he’ll tell the player to turn back.

This example doesn’t really do anything after the player enters the correct password. The guard might move out of the way, or it might transfer the player immediately. You might even want to add a cutscene. This event also doesn’t use a switch or a self switch—yet. You would normally use a switch of some kind to prevent the player from entering the password multiple times. If you want to learn about how to use switches, check out my tutorial here.

This is what the Name Input Processing screen looks like in-game.

The face is the face of the selected actor—the actor whose name we are changing. You might want to leave the face blank. In this case, the face is a guard, because the guard is asking the player to enter the password. You might create a graphic of a locked door. Use your imagination.

Hopefully this tutorial has shown you a cool new trick. Have fun with it. Thanks for reading, and happy game making. :)