Emerald Cat Ears

My notes as I goof around with RMMZ

[emeraldcatears]

An Introduction

Main blog is @emeraldmew

I finally decided to check out RPG Maker MZ, so this blog will be a sort of note-taking tool for me to keep track of how I'm learning. Feel free to learn alongside me, but be warned I am a noob.

Some background:

I'm not completely new to RPG maker but I'm going into this as though I'm starting fresh because I honestly haven't used it in a long time. I first got RPG Maker XP back when Pokemon Essentials was a thing. I pretty much never touched the base program and instead just played with the Pokemon Essentials specific stuff. But I ended up giving up on it.

There were a few factors involved in that. Real Life stressors kind of left me in a funk for a decade a while so I didn't practice much. Then other things cropped up. A lot of the resources around at the time also tended to expect you to come in knowing the right terminology. There was just so much to learn that I couldn't actually decide where to start and ended up just making maps instead. Eventually I just sort of fell out of love with the idea of making a Pokemon fangame altogether (in favor of an original monster system but I got overwhelmed over where to start). In short, I got discouraged.

But I still kept getting the itch to make a game. I debated for years over whether to just try with XP or try to learn with a newer version and finally made the decision to use MZ.

So why the sideblog?

I figure if I keep something external that I update it'll act as motivation to keep learning when things don't go well. I sort of think of it as an old-fashioned commonplace book used for storing notes in a way others can also use.

It's not a tutorial - I'm a noob myself - but I'll be recording things as I figure them out. Feel free to join me on this journey.

[spejoku]

Ok todays rpg maker adventures

So the visustella battle styles try to emulate a specific game's damage formula so you can theoretically save time making skills. Their ff9 formula is messed up when it comes to physical attack skills, though.

So I asked for help on the forums here and people were cool and rad and helped me figure out what was happening. Also I learned a lot about Javascript. Basically, because rpg maker doesnt separate base atk and the equipped weapon atk bonus, the ff9 formula gets messed up when calculating the base strength of an attack skill. So cool strangers on the internet helped me figure out how to fix that.

So now that I understand more about the damage formula, its a lot easier to implement skills. My plan was to have all my physical style attack skills either use unique formulae or to work like a basic attack with an applied total damage modifier, which i can do pretty easily now. I just need to make sure that my enemy statblocks include a level, or go back and include a workaround in the damage formula (enemies dont have a lvl parameter by default)

Next up- making art assets and enemies. I should also go over the skills that both enemies and actors can use, and make sure they're using the right damage formula. MZ uses Effekseer for its animations, I should download that and play around with that. A mecha game needs lasers and missiles .

Also the menu editor plugin doesnt play perfectly well with the visustella battle plugins, mainly by making animations play on the wrong targets when I edit the battle ui and im not yet sure how to mitigate that. Its not a really high priority but it bothers me.

Anyhow, forums are rad.

[emeraldcatears]

Finally decided to start poking around at the VisuStella Plugins... going to be a while before I figure out all the ins and outs.

Character made with Caz's Pixel Fantasy Character Generator.

[necronatural]

The last version of my guide is 2 years old, and doesn't account for some new features, new competition, and some rebrands, so once again;

Here's a purchase guide for when RPG Maker is on sale, as well as the Visual Novel makers available.

[emeraldcatears]

RPG Maker MZ... on Linux?

So I got fed up with Windows and decided to back up all my stuff and move to Linux (Mint, for the curious). Unfortunately as I was super new to Linux I did not know how to access my RPG Maker projects.

With a shoutout to @psycho-linguist for providing me with this lovely link: https://www.howtogeek.com/738967/how-to-use-steams-proton-to-play-windows-games-on-linux/

I was able to get MZ to run through Steam with proton.

But then the question was... how do I access the projects I'd stored on my windows desktop -> usb -> shiny new Linux desktop?

Well, it turned out to be really simple for me.

Call me disorganized, but I like to save stuff to folders on my desktop. So I simply opened the folder I stored my RPG Maker projects in...

see that game.rmmzproject one? If you try to open it it'll suggest things like opening it in Libre Office, which isn't exactly helpful. But what I did was open RPG Maker MZ through Steam/proton and basically just dragged and dropped the game.rmmzproject icon into the open project menu.

Everything I'd put together for that project popped right up! And now that I've done that...

I find I can just search in the open project menu like I used to.

Honestly I can't believe something so easy blocked me for so long.

[emeraldcatears]

So I got fed up with Windows bs and switched to Linux. Anyone know how to run rpg maker on a linux system (explainable to a total noob who is very new to linux)?

[emeraldcatears]

Sounds like it's time to figure out my way around wine/proton.

[emeraldcatears]

I may be an idiot. How do I get this thing to work?

[emeraldcatears]

So I got fed up with Windows bs and switched to Linux. Anyone know how to run rpg maker on a linux system (explainable to a total noob who is very new to linux)?

[emeraldcatears]

Sounds like it's time to figure out my way around wine/proton.

[emeraldcatears]

So I got fed up with Windows bs and switched to Linux. Anyone know how to run rpg maker on a linux system (explainable to a total noob who is very new to linux)?

[emeraldcatears]

I tried downloading Godot to play around with it instead of RPG Maker but...

Any idea why the text looks like this when I haven't even done anything with the engine yet? You can almost make out some words like Settings or Projects here and there but this is not really usable.

[emeraldcatears]

my initial look around months ago suggested I needed to update my drivers but they are up to date and I tried 4.4 and I have the same issue (rather, it looked fine the first time I opened it but every time I've opened it since gets this again)

probably gonna give up and go back to learning RPG Maker because this is just frustrating.

[emeraldcatears]

Based on another thread I found earlier versions of godot don't have this issue so I might try learning 3.6.

[emeraldcatears]

I tried downloading Godot to play around with it instead of RPG Maker but...

Any idea why the text looks like this when I haven't even done anything with the engine yet? You can almost make out some words like Settings or Projects here and there but this is not really usable.

[emeraldcatears]

my initial look around months ago suggested I needed to update my drivers but they are up to date and I tried 4.4 and I have the same issue (rather, it looked fine the first time I opened it but every time I've opened it since gets this again)

probably gonna give up and go back to learning RPG Maker because this is just frustrating.

[emeraldcatears]

so if i'm thinking correctly, a party system would basically be made similarly to an inventory system, right?

[emeraldcatears]

I tried downloading Godot to play around with it instead of RPG Maker but...

Any idea why the text looks like this when I haven't even done anything with the engine yet? You can almost make out some words like Settings or Projects here and there but this is not really usable.

[emeraldcatears]

Trying to decide whether I like the wheat tiles or not.

[emeraldcatears]

Equipment

There's a fair bit to look at when it comes to making equipment for your game beyond the armor and weapons themselves, so let's start by diving into the Types tab.

If you haven't played around much on your own yet, you might wonder why Equipment Types are separated out from Armor and Weapons and have categories for the other two inside it.

That's because Equipment Types are the slots for equipment, such as the ones displayed here in the initial equipment section of the Actor's Tab.

You can assign a piece of armor an Equipment Type from the dropdown in the Armors tab. Weapons are handled in a different tab. The game expects the first equipment type to be weapons and handles weapon types separately, so the types that appear in the dropdown will be from 02 Shield down.

Note that even if you make extra slots for accessories by adding something like "Accessory 2" in the default RPG Maker...

... you will only be able to assign any piece to one of the two accessory slots. This means your player won't be able to double up on the same accessory since it can't go in the other slot. This can be changed with a plugin, however, though I am not covering plugins in this post.

Weapon and Armor types are similar in nature. This determines if the piece you made can be used by one of your characters. Under the actors or classes tab you can add the Trait that allows them to use a certain weapon or armor type.

The game expects Equipment Type 01 to be weapon and sorts all weapons into that slot. 02 is expected to be Shield. 03 and on are whatever armors or accessories you desire.

The reason it wants you to use this order is because the Dual Wield trait. If you give a class or actor this trait the game will replace the second equipment slot for that actor or actors with that class with a second version of the first equipment slot.

So let's say I want to give my hunter the ability to equip arrows. If I make arrows a weapon type I could give them a bow in one hand and an arrow in another and give the class Dual Wield... but nothing would stop the player from equipping two bows at once instead, or just two arrows without any bow.

Instead I'll make the arrows an accessory. That means in terms of the database they'll be considered Armor. I'll make an Armor type for arrows and leave the Equipment types as they are and make the arrows an accessory. Then I add the Trait to equip Armor Type Arrows to the Hunter class so my hunter can equip them but characters who don't use bows and arrows can't.

The parameter changes of Armors can add to attack or speed as easily as they can add to defense. Likewise, just because something's a weapon doesn't mean it can't add defense or luck or whatever else you like. You can also use Traits to add Attack Elements or other effects to equipment. Want to make a fluffy winter coat that gives the wearer resistance to Ice but also weakness to Fire at the same time? You absolutely can!

[emeraldcatears]

I have like three learnalong things basically ready to go except my brain just doesn't want to figure out the right wording.

[emeraldcatears]

so what i'm getting is that making an rpg in godot will involve making all of the arrays. all of them.

[emeraldcatears]

as a side bonus I keep thinking of selling strange chests on flight rising as popping them from my hoard array and appending them to an auction house array, which is probably exactly what is happening.

[emeraldcatears]

dog is being clingy.

gotta pause learning for now