RPG DIALOG MAKER FOR FREE

Those are all examples of binary triggers - things that are either true or false - but you can also create variables for your game to track and use in triggering events, and with those, you can get into some truly creative territory.

RPG DIALOG MAKER FOR FREE

That means you could create a villager NPC who greets you pleasantly if you’re wearing a certain piece of armour, but coldly if you’re wearing a different one a town where you can only enter buildings if you’ve read a certain sign or a barkeep that will serve you for free if you have an attractive party member alongside you. These let you set up more than one outcome (‘page’) for a given event, and then specify what conditions lead to each page being put into motion. The possibilities are pretty endless, and really start to expand when you add in the ability to make conditional event triggers with ‘pages’. There’s even a handy selection of pre-rolled ‘Easy Events’, so you can set down frequent features like save points, inns, and shops without having to work out the nitty-gritty details. You can use events to display messages, emotes, or branching-path dialogue trees you can start or stop timers, change the weather, or shake the screen you can increase or decrease gold, HP, or EXP, remove characters from a party, or cue in a sound effect. That’s a simple example of the kind of logic behind events, but they can do so much more than teleport a character from one map to another. Then, when our still-unnamed heroine bumped into that icon from the opening overworld view, she was transported inside the gates of the town. When we wanted to link up our world map to the first town in our game, for instance, we created a ‘Move Location’ event, specified that we wanted the party to change location to the first town when this event became active, and then placed its trigger over the town icon on the world map. They can get complex, but at a basic level they’re very easy to get to grips with. These are the visual, relatively intuitive pieces of programming you’ll use to turn your collection of maps, characters, and dialogue into a coherent game. Once we’d made a few maps, we tried our hand at stringing them together, which involved our first foray into the world of RPG Maker’s ‘Events’ system. Options like an area fill, move tool, and copy/paste streamline the cartographic creation process a bit, and you can jump in and test play the area at any time to get a feel for how it will work on the ground. Either way, map-making is relatively straightforward: you pick graphical elements from a palette, and then ‘paint’ them onto the canvas using the stylus, or buttons if you prefer. There are preset samples in each category - which helps enormously in getting off the ground - but you can also start from scratch. Maps come in four basic types: world maps, cities, dungeons, and interiors. Here you’ll be able to create up to 99 different areas, and eventually link them together to tell your tale. We started our initial tour of RPG Maker in the Maps section, and that felt like a good choice.

There’s no tutorial or real guidance given at this stage - we’ll come back to that - but diving in, it’s relatively easy to get a feel for how each piece works in concert: maps are where you’ll create the geography of your game, events are the tools you’ll use to tell the story, control behaviours, and ‘program’ set pieces, and the Database holds all of the information that gets called on to make your game unique - characters, monsters, weapons, and so on. When you jump into RPG Maker Fes, you’ll be greeted with a basic menu that lays out the three main components of game creation: Maps, Events, and the Database.

Rpg dialog maker