How To Start A Game At A Certain Time

[Carly]

Hi! So, I'm very new to RPG Maker 2003, and don't know much about it. With that said, is there any way to start a playtest at a certain event, instead of at the very beginning? I'm planning on making a game with a playthrough time of a few hours, so I don't want to have to start a playtest from the very beginning just to see if I fixed a coding error. If there isn't any way to do this, is there any way to work around it?

 

[Guiguimu]

I don't have a bright idea so these are only suggestions ^^''
You could always save before the event, like a area before, or change the starting point if possible (better if it is a cutscene you want to test).

 

[AdamSakuru]

You need to learn about labels, you will find them very handy!
http://blog.rpgmakerweb.com/tutorials/loops-and-labels/

Here's an example, halfway through the event, you put a label called "Test_Skipper". At the very beginning of the event if you use the "Jump to Label" command, it will jump to whatever label in that event page has the same name. Each label can only be used once, meaning you can't have two of the same label.

 

[CleanWater]

Check my tutorials for beginners here in these forums.

2 - Creating Our First Map!

You can always set the starting place where you need to do the testings.

 

[Cherry]

@AdamSakuru I believe it was about a point in the play time, several hours into the game, not about jumping to a label in a single event script.
@Carly As others already said, setting the starting point and save/load are options, but be aware that save/load would usually make more sense than simply putting the starting point somewhere else, because you will want to keep the progress such as character stats, items, variable states etc. For testing new maps, a combination of the two can be useful: Put temporary teleport events somewhere near the area where you saved your game, or create a common event listening to a special key input (or a switch being turned on via the F9 menu) to teleport you to the new area.

 

[AdamSakuru]

@AdamSakuru I believe it was about a point in the play time, several hours into the game, not about jumping to a label in a single event script.

Oh, right. Okay, so there isn't much you can do in the way of making quick progress, but this is actually a good thing. Depending on how complicated your game gets, you'll actually want to test the whole thing through. This is probably less the case in RPG Maker 2003, but in my MV project, I constantly catch new things that need to be tweaked as I add new plugins to my project.

The best advice I can give is to have some sort of 'developer' setting. Maybe an NPC you can interact with who gives the player maximum stats. This is purely for you to breeze through battles so you can just get through the portions of your game you want to test for functionality.