Talking to my party and menus from items.

[TheOriginalFive]

First, how do I make it so that I can interact with my followers in RPGMaker? My game is about four friends retrieving a lost artifact, and I made a test game where they got lost on a small island to try out the program's functions.

The second: What's the most efficient way to allow a menu to only be accessed from an item? Such as only allowing saving from a phone (in-game, it's called taking a snapshot) or reading up the story so far on the same phone? My guess is to do with common events, but if there's a better way, I'd like to know.

Third: Any suggestions for making bonus content accessible from the main menu after the game is completed at least once with its good ending?

 

[Kes]

Those are 3 very different questions and bundling them together into one thread is likely to cause some confusion.

Your first question - what do you mean "interact with my followers"?  Do you mean construct dialogue sequences?  Do you mean that they start off as separate sprites that you want to click on and have them join the party?  Or what?  The question is so basic that I would like to suggest that you have a look at Andar's compilation of information for those new to the engine.  You can find it here.  Spending time on this now will answer a lot of your questions and will save you a huge amount of time and frustration in the future.

 

[Miss Nile]

For your second question, yes, it's done through a common event. You can disable saving through the "Disable Save Access" at the beginning of your game. Then go to the item you want, have it set to say, comment event A. In the common events tab, create said comment event A, and just have a "Call Save Screen" command. Couldn't be easier.

 

[Wavelength]

First, how do I make it so that I can interact with my followers in RPGMaker? My game is about four friends retrieving a lost artifact, and I made a test game where they got lost on a small island to try out the program's functions.

Turn the followers off, and represent them using events when you want to be able to interact with them.

The second: What's the most efficient way to allow a menu to only be accessed from an item? Such as only allowing saving from a phone (in-game, it's called taking a snapshot) or reading up the story so far on the same phone? My guess is to do with common events, but if there's a better way, I'd like to know.

Yeah, use a Common Event.  From there, if you want to call the menu itself, you'll want to use scripting.  This guide contains much that will help you.  Additionally, if you look into the script editor, look around for SceneManager.call and SceneManager.goto commands - these are really useful for creating or calling menus.

EDIT: What I forgot when I wrote this is that, like Miss Nile mentioned, there are a few menus/scenes that can be accessed  from an event without needing to script anything - check out "Scene Control" on Page 3 of the event commands.

Third: Any suggestions for making bonus content accessible from the main menu after the game is completed at least once with its good ending?

I'm shocked how often this has been coming up lately because I thought I was the only person who would really want or need to do this.  And I did create it for myself (it took some effort and scripting knowledge), and I'd like to make it into a publicly-available script, but I can't really figure out a good way to do so because each game is going to want to do something a little different.

Anyhow, the best suggestion I can give you here is that since you will need this data to exist outside a save file (unless you want to take the even harder approach of parsing all save files for a new data object that you create), so you should create an extra file in the System folder.  You can manipulate and read this new file using the following script commands:

save_data(object_name, filepath)

object_name = load_data(filepath)

These will be massively helpful in terms of tracking data outside of your save file.

 

[TheOriginalFive]

Thanks for all your answers. I'll hop to the tutorials right away to avoid making more dumb questions.