Escape from Tag World Devlog 1: Initial Idea & First Prototype

In 2024, I created a board game called Nay Saga. I had originally thought I needed a break from making board games and would go back to video games... but then I saw the results of my game when my family played Nay Saga.

It inspired me to make another physical game. Something smaller scaled because Nay Saga ended up getting bigger and bigger. One of my original goals for 2025 was to really scope down and make something smaller so I could recover from some burnout.

So this brings me to 2025's project and what's currently called Operation Linkship (by the time you're reading this, it will have a final name, but this post was written in December 2024 when I first started this project).

I really wanted to focus on making a small game. One that fits in a small box and is a small amount of cards (~150-200 at most). And probably not any extra pieces outside of cards, or if there are, they'll be pretty limited.

This idea started because I had so much fun playing Party House in UFO 50. Originally, my brother and I were talking about making our own version of Party House with our characters just for fun and it wasn't going to go beyond that. Then we played Flip City, which was a game with very similar mechanics, but different enough to be its own game, and it was a physical card game version.

So I immediately started to come up with ideas about how I could make my own version that's inspired by these types of games but is my own experience with my characters. I was inspired by Party House in UFO 50, Flip City, Tea Dragon Society, To the Moon: Bestest Memories, and Parks. All of those have a deck building mechanics or "buying" of cards to slowly build a deck and collect points. I played all of these games very close to each other over Christmas break and it was a really fun mechanic that I wanted to create a game around.

I started by brainstorming a bunch of ideas for games about The Nays, based on Eventures and story moments. Then I limited it down to just ones that fell into this category. The first idea I came up with really stuck with me. When Cipo is first interacting with The Nays, he's helping them earn money to buy a linkship.

To tie this in, I thought about how there could be a mechanic where you're earning money to essentially recruit characters or pay them to join your team (which is your deck). Each character could have some kind of ability or action along with the following: a cost to recruit them, some kind of "points" towards winning, money that you gain when they're on your team, and a variable that adds to whether or not they'll contribute to you stopping your turn. All of the games I got inspiration from had some combination of those, so that's where I ended up on deciding the basics for what I wanted on the card.

From there, I started to sketch out lots of card concepts in my sketchbook. Because I already spent months designing the Nay Saga cards, I really wanted to keep this design simple and not make any of the same mistakes. I drew a few pages worth of sketches, using various games as inspiration and remembering the notes and feedback on the Nay Saga cards. I was still having a lot of trouble coming up with a design where the shapes were harmonious and were speaking the same language (as that's a piece of feedback that really stuck with me when I was struggling to come up with the Nay Saga cards).

Eventually, I decided to take a break from the thumbnails and try to make something in Photoshop to see if I could get any closer. I threw a few shapes together and mock-up text and colors. The rough colors and icons were really throwing off my ability to look at just the layout as a whole because of how rough they were and because they were clashing, but considering I did all of this in a day, I decided to settle on it for the time being until I came up with more concrete rules and details so I could have something to start with in terms of testing and quick prototyping.

I made a Notion page and a database of tasks to start to plan out the project. I'm mainly planning to have most of the preliminary concepting done during the first few months on the side of doing other projects (like getting back into The Nays), then completing the bulk of it during June and July. These dates are tentative, but a way for me to really scope it down and make sure I'm staying within what I have time to do so I can give myself a break this year.

Then I started on the spreadsheet where I laid out all of the characters and started to come up with numbers for their different stats. I largely based the layout and tabs on the one I made for Nay Saga, but revised it to fit with this game instead. I also ended up coming up with some abilities for them, which led to potentially adding more symbols to the card. So I'll definitely be changing the initial card designs I concepted earlier in the day to fit more with the specifics that I started to expand upon. I'm mostly keeping ideas in a Notion doc and my Discord channel so it's pretty loose and everything in this post is likely to change once I start fleshing things out more.

I spent a lot of time working on the spreadsheet for the database. While working on it, I expanded it even more and started to come up with more rules and fleshed out the game when I came up with all of the abilities. I was starting to figure out which cards the players would start with, so I added a few more cards as well that would be similar or the same abilities, just to have a few more at the start.

I decided that each character will have a "group" that they're part of and there will be 12 special cards that you're basically trying to collect so you can win the game. The first person to collect 3 of them face up in their deck while they're playing wins. So I made each of these cards have abilities and conditions to earn points from certain groups to buy them. And then you can use them if you have half the amount of points you spent (you'll just have to spend those points on your turn). I ended up making the special cards on their own tab and added commented-out areas in nanDECK to make automating them easier, so I can just do 2 exports to line everything up correctly.

Then I started to sketch some icons to use for the different groups. Some of them I might just mostly reuse what I made from Nay Saga if they make sense, but I might change up the style of them and not use the exact drawings (just the same symbol). There were a few I wasn't super sure about, but I did some sketches to try and figure some of those out.

Then I started to come up with the overall story more in-depth and goals so I could name the values/points/etc. I know the "money" or currency you use to purchase one of them (probably the regular character cards) will be called Birdians, to fit with the Tag World theme. I'm still trying to think of a more creative name for the special cards and the points you use to purchase them. I'm thinking maybe Linkship pilots are the cards and then I'll have to think more about the points/credits you use to purchase them. And then finally, the negative points going towards ending the round are probably going to be called Alerts or something of that nature, since the idea here is that the characters are messing up and alerting the Higher-Up Birds accidentally, so they have to be sent back to their Shelters and not escape Tag World if there are too many. So I started sketching some of those symbol ideas.

I brainstormed a few ideas for logos and titles. I'm still not really sure what it's going to be called, but the more I started to think about the whole Tag World theming and involving the Higher Up Birds/Bird-in-Trainings, I'm kind of leaning more towards "Escape from Tag World". I just don't know if it has the right ring to it or if it's too long. But some of these logos came out okay for the first drafts.

I decided to come up with ways to integrate the symbols into the overall design more for the digital version. I made a very rough idea to turn the symbol for the cost into the Birdian or Points symbol so it's more clear what you're using it for. I also played around with putting the group name at the top since that's more important, and then the character's name at the bottom near their ability to show that's the unique ability that they're bringing (along with the symbol for their group). This example (below) is using the longest group and longest character name to ensure they fit. I also spent a bit of time looking for fonts, so I'm thinking about using Cabin. Because this card game will require more text on the cards, I was looking for a font that isn't entirely capital letters and is Sans Serif so it'd be easier to read more of the text.

I saved all of the card files out from my rough concept so I could start to quickly iterate on this prototype. I threw it all together in nanDECK and saved out all of my image files. Luckily I had a lot of experience doing this with Nay Saga, so it was pretty straightforward. This one had a few more moving parts because it has more text and variables that change between cards, but it wasn't bad. I also had all of the character drawings from Nay Saga that I could reuse for this. I might even reuse them (and just reposition them) for the final version even since it'll save me a lot of time and make this a much smaller scaled project.

Then I saved them out to be usable in Tabletop Simulator. I imported them in and was able to start testing out the game already! It's amazing how quickly this can go with these tools. I was able to come up with the idea and then, about 2 days later (of working on it), already have a playable version in TTS!

So I did some testing in Tabletop Simulator and I took a lot of notes on areas to update with the rules and cards. It ended up being pretty fun, but I definitely have a lot of updates to make based on those tests.

I made a few updates to the cards based on my first playtest to balance some of the cards a bit better. I added another card to the starting group and modified some of those so it's easier to gain Birdians in the beginning. I decided to change up how you play the special cards as well to see if that would make it go a bit faster. Once I made the updates, I loaded them into Tabletop Simulator to further test and see how it worked.

After some more playtesting, I updated the balance of some of the cards further to add more points to cards you'd get later in the game, because I noticed it was taking a long time to get even the first special card. I added some new formulas in Google Sheets and nanDECK to further automate the cards. I wanted it to be more clear when cards were subtracting points vs. adding them, so I made some formulas to change the image and text color depending on if it's subtracting.

 

I also made some updates to the card visuals so the values on the right side are shaped uniquely so it's easier to tell what values they're contributing to. I also reflected that at the top depending on what type of cost they are to recruit them (Birdians vs Points).

Then I figured out how to add icons to the text in the ability section so I could more clearly indicate what the cards were talking about without the player needing to memorize a bunch of specific terms. This includes replacing the Points, Birdians, and Alerts with their symbols and then also adding the symbols before the group names when they're referenced. In addition, I added some mock-up colors for the cards. I'm still trying to decide if I want the name or the group at the top (leaning towards name so the group can be next to the icon it's associated with).

Next, I'm going to continue to playtest so I can iterate on the layout of cards! I'm hoping to nail these down before I make any final assets so I can just focus on the gameplay without having to worry about how the cards look (since they're still pretty rough right now).

2026 Plan

Welcome to 2026!

For the start of this year, I'm following tradition of adding to my yearly art image. It's getting quite big so maybe I should chop it up at some point, but here it is:

In this post, I'll build off of what I talked about in my previous 2025 recap post. So you can read that post for the full context before this. As usual, this one's a text-heavy post so not really any visuals beyond this point; just thoughts and plans.

Recap

Last year I focused a lot on scoping down and taking a step back, and I think it really worked out well for me. I mainly missed not writing as many Eventures or working on The Nays as much as I hoped. My plan is to mostly work off of the same framework as 2025 for 2026 though.

I usually have a lot of goals for the year, but this year leads into a 2-year goal I'm aiming for...

Game Project

I've previously mentioned that my brother and I are thinking about remaking our GGJ project, The Note Competition, and entirely retheming it. With this in mind, I really want this project to be at the forefront for the next year or two. This means all other projects would be more supplementary to meet this goal.

I have a detailed plan in my personal Google Docs/Notion pages, but essentially by the end of this year, I want to have a Steam page with the demo of the game live. And then the goal would be to release the full version of the game by the end of 2027.

To meet those goals and my dream of finally having my own game on Steam, I'm going to incredibly scope down all of my other projects and limit the types of goals I have outside of this so it can be attainable and not too stressful.

This means The Nays will be on the back-burner for a little bit longer. Obviously I'll still work on it as I have been, but I imagine it'll be closer to last year or the year prior in terms of how much I actually accomplish because of this.

 

2026 Goals 

With all of that in mind, here are my 2026 goals:

• Write 2 together Eventures and 1 solo Eventure.
• Create 2-3 Twines.
• Develop some kind of mini-solo game project (scoped down).
• The Note Competition Remake Progress:
• Create a playable demo.
• Create a Steam page and upload the demo to Steam.
• Attend GDEX and present the demo at a table.
• Stretch Goal: Finish most of the full game for version 1.

I know this may look like a lot and I just said I'm scoping down, but I don't think it's unreasonable. My goals for The Nays are about equal to what I did last year, if not a little bit less.

And then for my mini solo project, I'm envisioning something that doesn't take longer than 1 month. If the RPG Maker Game Jam runs again, that would fill the slot for this. Otherwise, it could be something else I come up with that's very small in scope.

Lastly, that brings me to The Note Competition remake. If I want to showcase this at GDEX, that would mean finishing the demo by September or October. With that in mind, I could spend the rest of the year after that on refining the game and hopefully having something that's mostly there with the core mechanics. That way I can spend 2027 focusing on the playtesting and polish phases more so it can be released by fall that year.

Because this is a collaborative project with my brother, it really will all depend on how much time we both have and if this lines up, but it's something I really want to do. I've been slowly picking away at ideas for this game the past couple of months, but I really want to seriously start working on it this year to get it in a finished spot and turn it into my first real big commercial project on Steam.

So that's it for my goals this time. These are definitely some of my most text-heavy posts, but I like to reflect on where I'm at because it's a core part of my creative process to hold myself accountable and measure my goals. I hope next year at this time I'll be able to report where The Note Competition remake is at (and what the new title even is). Thanks for reading this post and sticking with me while I figure this all out!

2025 Recap

2025 is wrapping up, so that means it's time to think about how the year went and what's to come next year.

I usually start with a summary of my drawings from the year, so here's that: 

And then this year I'm starting a new tradition... Posting my summary of games! It's not a game from every month, but this year it actually ended up being more than 1 game a month. This is just to showcase more of my focus in game dev:

One of my main goals of this year was to scope down and do less. The fact that I developed 15+ games might not sound like I scoped down, but to be fair, 6 of those were for work and I included 2 of my Twines in here. So just a lot of mini projects instead of big projects! I'll talk more about these projects as I walk through my detailed recap of the year:

 

Recap

 

In 2025, I started using Clockify for all of my projects to really keep track of my time better. To start off this post, I'll show my overall project time to take a glimpse at where those were all at. I tracked all of my projects besides The Nays (writing Eventures, proofreading, and other various activities relating to them), so it's a fairly accurate representation on where I spent most of my time on projects. Overall I spent about 658 hours on these projects throughout the year. It'll be interesting to compare these year-over-year as I continue to track my project time! This will also be helpful so I can gauge how many projects I can accomplish in a year so I don't overscope and keep my goals within reason.

With Clockify, I can also view how much time I spent on my projects per month and which projects were worked on in which months. I took these screenshots in late December so some of my projects from December weren't tracked here, and I did edit the screenshot below to also show December 2024 when I started tracking Escape From Tag World so it'd be more accurate to the projects I'll talk about in this blog post (~28 hours not accounted for in the graph above). As you'll see here, January and August were my most productive months with March and April close behind. And June, October, and December were the busiest in my personal life, so had the least amount of project time.

 

Month-by-Month Project Summary

If you remember my recap post from 2024, you know that 2024 ended rough with being sick and burnt out. But that led me to coming up with my main project for the year: Escape From Tag World.

As my yearly projects sometimes do, this project started in December technically. And you'll see this theme come up a lot in my projects, but I wanted to make something small compared to Nay Saga. So in December and January, I planned some of the initial rules, sketched some card concepts, put together some prototypes in nanDECK, and tested it out in Tabletop Simulator.

Outside of that, I also got an early start on my Eventure Twines. I finished the storyboard sketches for The Gek's Favorite Eventure and the ComplexNet Eventures, and also did the lineart on The Gek's Favorite Eventure.

My brother and I were able to write our first Eventure of the year, the Frank Lady Eventure, as well. So we were off to a stronger start on Eventures.

Leading up to the Global Game Jam, there was a trial period for RPG Maker Unite, so I tried it to see if it was worth using, since I hadn't used it since the beta. It still didn't feel quite right for GGJ, so I just made a test project and messed around a bit. I also edited together The Note Competition game dev vlog.

And then we made our GGJ project, World Bub. We kept trying to scope back for this one because last year we over-scoped. It was still a pretty big project and probably our most complicated one so far, but it was reasonable and we did cut some areas from the plan. We planned for only a few characters and also made the sprites a lot more simple so it'd be easier to fit into the scope. It turned out being my favorite GGJ project so far because I'd say it's definitely the most fun gameplay-wise. I spent a few extra days after GGJ updating it and doing some bug fixes, but didn't spend quite as long as I did for last year's project. We met for a day in February to do some final fixes beyond the couple of days the week after, but that was it.

After the GGJ, I was still inspired to make games so I decided to learn Pixel Game Maker MV. I've wanted to learn it and always stop halfway through the initial tutorials. So I spent a day on it and finally made a quick test level with my own assets. I reused assets mostly from World Bub, but was able to learn more about a new game engine.

Then I came back to The Nays. I was proofreading a bunch of Eventures as I read through them, and also writing some Eventure Trailer scripts. Trying to make progress on both of those goals. I also finished all of the lineart for the ComplexNet Eventure Twine and all of the base colors for The Gek's Favorite Eventure.

By March, I had finished all of the shading for The Gek's Favorite Eventure Twine. Then from there, they announced the RPG Maker Game Jam was returning for this year. It wasn't the most ideal time, but I decided to participate because I figured that could be my solo game for the year that I wanted to make. I knew I would be out of town for one of the weeks it was running, so I decided to spend a couple of days before the official start date just brainstorming ideas before officially working on the game. Once it officially started, I made some core mechanics and started making some of the functionality for the puzzles I had planned. By the end of March, I had the core mechanics, game loop, and story done for #No_Hacks.

The majority of April was spent finishing up the game. I dedicated about a week to the art and another to playtesting. Like I mentioned, I was gone for a week of this time, so I really planned and scoped around that so I could mostly be done with the game before I left and focus on the visuals and testing when I got back.

After the #No_Hacks was done, I came back to working on the ComplexNet Eventure Twine and finished all of the base colors. I also worked on a Google Sheets template for which characters are there for each Eventure so I could update that instead of a Photoshop file more easily.

In May, I came back to the Escape From Tag World project because I was making good progress on my other projects. I had a lot of travel, and worked a lot of weekends and overtime during this month, so I didn't have a lot of time to dedicate to projects. But with the time I did, I made a design for the cards that was more finalized and did a lot of playtesting. I tested in TTS but also printed the first cards and started to solidify the rules more.

At this point, I was really burning out at work, which affected my personal projects a bit too. In June, I was also doing travel for work, working weekends, and I went to the Origins board game convention. For Escape From Tag World, I really only playtested this month. I did finish The Gek's Favorite Eventure Twine though, including the trailer and everything.

In July, I really tried to get back into it and ended up getting a lot done on my personal projects. I finished the ComplexNet Twine including the shading on the drawings and the trailer. I also mostly finalized the card design for Escape From Tag World.

Then we wrote the SN World Eventure and did some drawings around it. This really motivated me to get back in the mood for The Nays. I had a period of time where I was really in the zone. I wrote the Forbidden BBW Eventure, rewrote the Aiml World Eventure, and planned a bunch of rewrites or new Eventures. I started going through and reading more of them and did some sketches and drawings from the Eventures too.

In August, I started to take a break from writing The Nays. We did a drawing activity with Mr Marcus World, but otherwise I went back to Escape From Tag World. I started to finalize all of the additional game pieces including the box, and finally making the logo and title of the game. I spent a lot of time on different iterations for the logo, box, and card backs.

During my week off from work at the end of August and beginning of September, this was the first time since 2020 that I didn't travel a lot during it. We wanted to keep it low key, so I got a lot of my personal projects done. I made the rulebook for Escape From Tag World and did the final printing of the game. I also finalized a lot of the game pages and Tabletop Simulator mod during this time.

Because I was pretty much finished with Escape From Tag World and I had a lot of time off, it really motivated me to start a bunch of new projects. My brother and I started a new project called Nay50 where we made three mini-games in Unity on the weekends.

The main project I worked on during my week off was starting an Eventure scene for the Bobolo River. I haven't finished it yet, but it was a project I spent a lot of time on. I wanted to focus on the visuals of a game project for a short cutscene from The Nays.

Then I did some video editing. I wrapped up my Eventure Twines with the video preview and started on a devlog for another GGJ project. I realized I hadn't posted gameplay videos of my games I've made throughout this year and last, so I recorded and posted those. I also started working on a game dev demo reel, which I fully edited together, but wanted to add a few unfinished projects to, so hadn't exported and uploaded it yet. I also attended GDEX.

And that leads me to October, where I originally planned nothing because the new Digimon and Pokemon games were releasing. So I just wrote descriptions for Eventure drawings that I hadn't posted online yet. And after I went to GDEX, I was inspired to start working on updating The Note Competition to RPG Maker MZ so we could remake the game, so I started that process.

Then in November, I really started working on a lot of mini projects because Escape From Tag World was done; I just made the how to play video and some social media plans. Otherwise, my brother and I wrote the Mr Marcus Eventure and also continued the event we started earlier around it.

And then because I was playing so many monster catcher games recently, I made a test project in RPG Maker and went down the path of making my own plugin. For all of the projects around this time, I was trying to learn plugin creation, so I was in the process of about 3 of them, but officially released one of them for The Note Competition remake. This was really a month of coding and hopping between projects.

But because I was working on so many mini projects and coding a lot, it did start to burn me out a little bit. There were a couple of weeks when I was having trouble focusing and I was starting to realize it was all maybe taking a toll on me again. The time between Thanksgiving and Christmas turned into mostly just Christmas shopping, prepping for Christmas, and wrapping up loose ends on everything I wanted to close out for the year. I also did more traveling around that time since I was actually not sick and able to attend our family Christmas party for the first time in 3 years!

After Christmas, I beta tested a plugin in RPG Maker, so I experimented a bit there. I also started re-reading Eventures in The Nays again, so it inspired me and led me to drawing and planning a bit. I started to get back into writing some of my Eventure trailer scripts too.

But with that, I'll transition into this next section.

2025 Goal Breakdown

And that was my 2025. Now I'll go through what my goals were last year and how I did with those:

• ✅ Write more than 2 Eventures (2 together, more than 2 solo).
• ✅ Create at least 2 Twines.
• ❌ Write most of the Eventure Trailer scripts.
• ✅ Create a solo game (either progress on an existing one or a new game).
• ✅ Make progress on game dev portfolio, updated resume, and/or game dev vlogs. 

I'd say I did pretty good with 4/5! While I didn't focus quite as much as I had hoped on Eventures, I did write 5 total: 3 together, 1 new solo, and 1 rewrite solo. So I just swapped them and wrote more than 2 together and 2 solo (counting a rewrite). The beginning of this year and spurts throughout the year were The Nays-focused, though, which was good.

I also made 2 Twines and a little more progress, but still not beyond the 2 a year. I'm not sure if I will be, but I can stick with 2 for now at least!

The goal I didn't meet was the Eventure trailers scripts. I made some progress and wrote a few of them, but wouldn't count that as most of them. I might put this goal on hold and just continue to write them whenever I'm reading Eventures or complete the Twine for now.

And as you saw with my initial game image... I made a lot of solo games! So definitely completed this goal. I'd say #No_Hacks and Escape From Tag World are the ones that count the most towards this goal, but I did more, which was fun.

And finally, I did make progress on my game dev portfolio. I only edited 1 game dev vlog fully and maybe didn't make a lot of progress, but I did at least mostly edit the demo reel that I'll post next year too. It's a slow process and one I'm continually working on.

 

Final Thoughts

2025 truly was the year of scoping down. I made that general goal, and I really hit that and have been trying to hone in on it.

I traveled less than normal, and it really healed me to have that time and space back to myself and my projects for a break year. I still traveled and spent the night elsewhere at least 7 times, but they were spaced out and more manageable, so it really was manageable and a good amount.

I also did a lot better with my schedule this year. I planned ahead knowing when I would be traveling or when game releases were happening to really know that nothing should be planned for that time. And because I expected to do nothing, when I did do something, it made me feel good because I did more than planned.

Additionally, everything was meant to be smaller, like I said previously. Escape From Tag World was one where I limited myself to only ~100 cards instead of ~750 cards and I challenged myself to fit it into a very small box so I couldn't include a bunch of extra game pieces to over-complicate it. 

Because I had a smaller year-end project, it also meant I had more time to work on smaller projects that I could hop between. This allowed me to work on whatever I was in the mood for instead of having to work on a project I was burnt out on.

I ended up getting a little excessive towards the end of the year when I had lots of little projects floating around though, but I at least tied up the loose ends and put them on hiatus as needed. 

So even though I met most of those goals of scoping down, I didn't end up working on The Nays as much as I maybe hoped I would. But I'm glad that it was an improvement from the previous year. I made a lot more mini projects instead.

The collaborative Eventures was one where we exceeded what I thought, so that was fun! I also feel like in general I was trying to be more collaborative this year. Both in spending more time with my friends and more voice chat days with my brother. It helped keep me motivated and working more collaboratively on projects.

Overall, 2025 was a pretty good year! I'm glad I finally took a break. I feel more rejuvenated than last year for the most part, so it was a much-needed break. I'm looking forward to next year. Thanks for reading!

RPG Maker Plugin Development

I've always wanted to learn how to make my own plugin in RPG Maker, so I decided to finally take the leap and figure out how it all works! This was a side track from a little creature collection game that I was experimenting with for a couple of days.

So to start, I read through the official RPG Maker plugin guide (using Google Translate since it's in Japanese) and learned some of the basics. While I didn't learn how to actually write my own plugin with reading it all the way through, I did take a lot of notes and now have a better understanding of how some of the structure works. It also helped me try and wrap my head around objects and classes, since those are always programming concepts that feel a bit abstract and I haven't fully used in my own projects (outside of the built-in objects from the RPG Maker Database).

I started by just making basic plugin parameters and making it all show up in RPG Maker, even if it wasn't really doing anything yet. Generally, I was just understanding parameters, their types, and basic structure.

Then I started to dive in and just start looking things up as I made my own plugin. I wanted to make a party manager plugin that deals with Windows, because those aren't easily editable through events or scripts. So I started with this forum post to use as a reference point for learning how to make a basic window where I could select options. It was a basic list with functions and handlers.

I was learning about setting window positions and then also figured out how to make fields editable and connected to the Plugin Manager in RPG Maker. So I was able to reference parameters that I set within the code itself. This included loading scenes, specifying images, etc.

From there, I learned about referencing specific RPG Maker events and objects from the database. Because I wanted this to be a party member manager, I had to get the party member data. This led me to working a bit with scoping because I had to make a function with the party member data that I could reference in all of my windows of the scene. So I stored it in an array.

Then I started to work on the window itself. I started with a command list that listed all of the party members by name from the database. Then I played around with some of the box sizes so I could fit face graphics in there. This led down a path of learning about how to show graphics in general. I was having some issues getting them to show up, so I preload them at the start of the game. Then, I also had to figure out how to use the built-in itemHeight(), itemWidth(), and maxCols() functions to change the size of those boxes to how I wanted them to display.

Then I decided to start working on what happens when you hover over a character. I wanted some kind of stats screen on the side so you can view their stats. So I made another window, but this time I called the window functions without the handlers to essentially load the data of the current actor you're selecting. Then I added stats like their name, an image, attack, etc.

The next day, I spent a few hours figuring out how to convert RPG Maker variables (and arrays) to be properly used in a plugin. It involved preloading the data after the scene is loaded, but was a lot more complicated than I was expecting. Then from there, I made the next window: the character window below. The main reason I needed an array is because I need to store all of the characters somewhere that's not the party members because it can exceed the number in the menu. So I wanted somewhere to store those actor IDs. It took me awhile to get that extra window showing up simultaneously, but I eventually got the faces to show up in a separate window. They had to be in a separate window because the size of those differed from the party so it also took some time to figure out getting the player to be able to move from the top window to the bottom one with the arrows.

I'm still working on this plugin and plan to continue adding more functionality so I can use it in my games. This was a fun challenge to start my pathway down creating my own RPG Maker plugin! I'm happy with what I have so far. Though this one isn't finished, I did manage to complete my own full plugin after this that you can read more about here. I'll come back to this plugin in the future, but it's a bit more complicated and has more parts to it, so it's taken more than a day like the other one did. I'm learning a lot and having fun with it!

CUPdate 92: Creature Collector Game

So lately I've been playing a lot of monster collection games like Digimon Story Time Stranger and Pokemon Z-A. I've always wanted to make my own monster collector type of game, but just never got around to doing it. So I was talking with some friends about ideas for our own and it inspired me to actually mock something up in RPG Maker. So that's where this little project started!

We started with some really rough Google Docs/Sheets to come up with brainstormed ideas. But then I hopped into RPG Maker to test out some ideas. I created a system where you can add creatures as party members and name them. I started with just 2 options to add to your party and used basic events.

Then I started to optimize this and dive into the code. I created a variable that stores the number of creatures you've caught and assigned that for an actor's ID. If you have more than 4, then it would essentially send it off to a box and not be on your active party. Then, once you choose a creature (in the game it would be catching it somewhere), then it changes the class of that actor ID to the name of the creature you caught. I'm essentially storing your party in the Actors and the creatures' default stats in the Classes.

Then I made some code that sets all of the information according to the class the creature takes on. It sets the name of the character to be that class (or creature's name), then sets their face and charset images to match that name, and allows the player to type a name for that creature. Then it shows you how many creatures you've caught.

So here's a little demo of how this all works, with a few different character options:

And from here, I took a little side journey into making my own RPG Maker plugin. Because that ended up getting pretty involved, I'll dive into more details about that in my next blog post. This ended up being a short one, but was a fun little side project I worked on for a couple of days!