The Note Competition Remake Devlog 2: Character Menus

I've been continuing to work on updates to The Note Competition remake game. Once I had some of the basic parts converted to RPG Maker MZ, I started thinking about how the menus would work.

I originally coded the characters to be actors in the database, and then each of them would have a class, where I'd set the stats for battles. I was thinking about how I would approach the party menu of selecting your team and moving them around. And then it hit me. I could actually manipulate this into just using the built-in equipment system and have each party member actually just be a piece of equipment with stats on the character and it would make it a lot easier.

So with this, I went down a bit of a rabbit hole of looking at menu customization plugins and trying to make my own layouts. I spent some time on a status window, but then I realized we probably won't need that and can just put it all into the equipment menu. So this was kind of for nothing, but it's there in case we need to pull it back out at least.

I also updated Casper Gaming's encyclopedia plugin a bit from my modified Nay Saga version to make sure it included equipment instead of actors. I also spent some time removing the ability to select the top menu because I wasn't planning to have multiple categories. I still need to work on the specifics of the menu and what's all included, but it's at least laid out enough as a starting point for the equipment. This is what I'm envisioning will be the emblems menu that we wanted to include in the original version of this game.

Then I sketched a few menus out in my sketchbook to kind of figure out what was really needed. This was when I actually realized the status menu wasn't needed and that we could probably just scrap it.

Then I implemented the equipment system fully. This meant updating all of my code for references to actor parameters and using equipment parameters instead. This actually cut down on some of the ID variables and my process really started to streamline for what we'll do for adding new characters. It's easier now, so I'm looking forward to using that!

Then I started to look at the VisuStella Items Equips Core plugin, which I hadn't used before. But because I'm looking at using the equipment menu for the party menu, this one will probably help make that be a bit more customized without having to create my own from scratch. So I played around with moving menus around and also customizing it so all of the character could display below in each category as well. I found some code and stitched it together to make this work pretty close to what I was thinking. Still obviously very placeholder in terms of visuals, but the functionality is feeling better.

   

So then from there I started to make a timeline. We're still very early in this game dev process, but my initial stretch goals in this plan include releasing a demo in 2026 and then the full game late 2027. But we'll see how that goes! We still need to start actual development since I've mostly been just playing around in the project and exploring some ideas. We don't have our solid plan yet, so once we do, then those dates will become more accurate. I'm looking forward to posting more about the process as we go.