Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
•
You could duplicate page 2 of each of your chests for this purpose and have a text box
that allows the player to decide whether or not to open the chest, based on what it
contains. Just make sure that said page is 3 and not 2; otherwise, it will never trigger.
(Never forget that events attempt to execute from right to left; the right-most page will
always be executed, if possible).
2.
Make it so that an opened chest remains visible until the minigame ends.
•
It's as simple as having for each chest one switch (you could name them
TreasureChest1
,
TreasureChest2
, and so forth) that is flipped on when its related chest is opened and
including another event page that requires that switch to be flipped on and has a graphic
of the open treasure chest. Grant bonus points for telling the player that the chest has
already been opened, if they examine it.
•
You'll have to toggle off those switches to reset the minigame conditions. Incidentally,
that's the reason why I don't use self-switches for the same purpose. A self-switch can only
be affected at a local level, which means that if you flip Chest 5's A switch, for example,
you would have to flip it off via Chest 5's event specifically.
3.
Have items that can only be received once per play-through.
•
Say you wanted to have a rare medallion as one of the seven possible rewards. What you
could do is use a switch that flips on when the player finds the item for the first time,
then have a conditional branch that changes the item found in a chest in subsequent
minigames.
•
It might be tempting to use an
Item exists
conditional branch here, but that will only
work if the rare item in question cannot be obtained elsewhere. Otherwise, weird things
will happen. Mainly, the player will not be able to obtain the item if he/she already has
it (even if the player has never gotten one from the minigame) and can get it multiple
times if it has a sell price (by selling the one he/she has before replaying the minigame).
Other Minigames
The mark of a great minigame is one that makes the player want to play it even more than the actual game. I'm a
personal fan of card games and have to admit that the ninth version of
Final Fantasy
and
Xenosaga Episode 1
have
card games that hooked me for dozens of hours. That's not bad for what is supposed to be a diversion from the main
plot. Following, I'll list some other ideas for minigames and offer tips and tricks on how I would start tackling them
within RMVXA.
1.
A sequence where the player has limited time to escape a certain area
•
For the sake of having an example, let's say the player is in a space station that is being
overrun by baddies. If the player does not reach the escape pod within 1000 steps, he/she
gets a game over.
•
There's no direct way to determine via eventing when a player has taken a step in RMVXA.
The easiest workaround is to use three variables. One variable checks the player's total
steps at the start of the escape minigame. The second saves the player's current steps
every time he/she moves, while the last variable is the difference between the first and
second variables. We'll need a Parallel Process event to cover those interactions.
•
The Parallel Process event would have a conditional branch that requires the difference
between the two variables to be 1000 or more. Once that is met, you employ the
Game
Over
command for its sole use.