Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Erase Picture asks for a control number and erases the displayed image that has said number. That concludes this
exercise. Give the player a Map item and test it out!
Variants on the Map Exercise
This is good and all, but following are some possible variants for you to think about as well.
1.
Make it so that the map marker moves as the player does.
•
As you have almost certainly noticed, you can still control the character when the map is
displayed.
•
To pull this off, all you need to do is copy-paste the part of the first common event that
handles the X and Y variables and add a
Move Picture
event command directly below that.
@>Control Variables: [0002:X] = Player's Map X
@>Control Variables: [0003:Y] = Player's Map Y
@>Control Variables: [0002:X] *= 14
@>Control Variables: [0003:Y] *= 8.69
@>Move Picture: 2, Upper Left (Variable [0002][00003]), (50%,50%),
255, Normal, @15
2.
Make a mini-map of the area.
•
I'm thinking in a manner similar to that of the Grinsia mini-map, where you have a
semitransparent map in the upper-left corner.
•
This is actually relatively simple. We render the same map picture with the Upper Left
origin but set the Zoom to 25% (which will shrink it to a quarter of its size). This drops it
down to 137
×
105. Additionally, we set its Opacity to 128, as we want the mini-map to be
somewhat see-through.
•
Then, we quarter the multipliers (which would become 3.5 and 2.17 for X and Y,
respectively) for the map marker as well. I also dropped the marker's Zoom down to 25%,
to keep it in line with the smaller map.
•
You could make an item that reveals an area's map to the player for a certain number
of steps.
•
Keep in mind that you'll need a picture for each individual area in which you plan to have
a mini-map. How would you handle an area like our interior structure map for the port
town, where there are multiple different areas on the same map? That's an exercise
for you.
Summary
This chapter covered a range of miscellaneous topics that were not covered in the topic's previous chapters. Among
them were creating a battle that requires a certain party member to participate, having encounters in which some
of the enemies appear during the battle rather than at the start, and creating mazes within a single map, with the use
of variables and Regions.
