Making non-map "menu towns"

[Doktor_Q]

For my current project, I wanted to handle towns as menus, rather than as actual maps- similar to how some dungeon crawlers or tactics rpgs often do. In town, you'll see a background image, some dialog or text, and a list of menu options like "store" "inn" "castle," etc. Choosing a menu option (say, "store") takes you to another background image of the store, and now there's a store menu with options for buy, sell, upgrade, leave (returns to the main 'town' menu). For my case, I also have a train station you can use to travel between discovered towns without going back to the overworld map.


Visual aid:

Spoiler

The Problem: While I have a pretty good idea of how it should work, I'm not sure how to set this up in events. My current attempt involved making each Town an event on the world map, and using event pages for each option (one page for shops, one page for the inn, etc), and using self switches and auto-run to flip between them, but it's become incredibly messy even for just my one test.


Other concerns I've had with alternate solutions:

• Trying to make the whole town on one event page is possible, but the event editor window is small enough that it starts to feel cramped if I try to do anything dynamic in town.
  
• I'm a bit concerned that if I just make them by calling common events, the traveling option might cause a stack overflow by calling a town inside a town, and then calling another town inside that, etc, or that it'd be harder to quite directly to the world map again. I'm not sure how event call stacks work, though.
  
• Since the current setup doesn't actually leave the world map, it doesn't reset the positions and such of map events. I'd very much like this feature.
  

Has anyone here done a game with this type of towns? What would you suggest to implement them?

 

[Engr. Adiktuzmiko]

From what I can tell, you're in the right direction.. It will indeed be quite a huge task though so you need to persevere if you really want to push that idea.


Else, you might just wanna make a plugin that does that though that in itself will also take a bit while to do.


If you need help optimizing your events or suggestions for them, we'd need to see what you've actually done so far.

 

[Doktor_Q]

Here's what I've got so far- a bit of the ends got cut off on a few, but the opening and ending bits are pretty standard between pages.


General synopsis: The first (lowest priority) pages are the default on-map icon, accessing it enters the town. I use two controls to manipulate this- "Menu Progress" is a check for what area I'm on, while "Self Switch A" signals you're "in town," and is a condition for all the auto-run pages. Nesting processing inside the choice branches


Between pages, the screen is faded out, the background picture(s because I'm lazy and using battle backs) are put up, relevant sounds are played, etc. Each page starts by fading the screen back in, and enters its main loop. The main loop shows any greeting dialog for the area, and gives the options menu. If I pick an option that goes to a different page, I update the Menu Progress to that page's number, and and use a Break Loop to skip out of the menu. The current page finishes running, and the newly-enabled event page starts auto running.


P.S. The "branch cancel -> open menu" is to let the player open the pause menu inside towns just by pressing the 'cancel/menu' key. I still need to work on standardizing the behavior, but it works well enough for now.


Reiterating the issues:

• To be honest, the structure feels really messy.
  
• Not sure the best way to do travel between towns, considering this event structure.
  
• Map doesn't refresh since you never leave the map, which is a bit of a problem.
  

A bunch of screenshots of the event editor:


Entrance (on-map event)

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Exit (placed here due to event page priority)

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Hub (central area)

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Shop (I just threw this together)

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Party management (character creation also uses Menu Progress, hence resetting it after the call)

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Save (also just thrown together)

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Travel (I've yet to make more towns to travel to, or figure out how I'd want to do this)

Spoiler

 

[Engr. Adiktuzmiko]

• Map doesn't refresh since you never leave the map, which is a bit of a problem.
  

You can force call the map refresh code if you really need to refresh the map the way that it does when you leave it and re-enter..

 

[Doktor_Q]

It looks like the call is just Game_Player.requestMapReload(), or so? The flags look simple enough, so I'll try with that and see how much other tweaking it needs. Thanks for the input!