Last Ray of Hope

Since I’m using a custom menu system for Blite, that also means that I need to make my own custom status screen to replace the default one.

One reason for this is there is no way just to show the default status screen, and also it would be out of place from the style I’ve used for the custom ones.

The playable character names were created using a custom name system, rather than using fixed names that RPG Maker 2000 forces you to, I instead created a popup keyboard where players could enter their own name, this is then stored into variables.

To display the name of a character during a message, all the variables that contain characters for the name just need to be displayed in a message box using the escape characters for showing variables. I think for RPG Maker 2000, it was something like “\v[1]\v[2]” or something like that.

The faith attribute which was a new feature to my game, was a percentage chance to be resurrected or healed in a region if your are in trouble, which could be increased by doing quests for the resident Gods.

I had an image in my mind for the item menu, on the left panel I wanted the list of items with little icons representing them.

On the right panel I was a giant 3d model version of the item rotating, but unfortunately that wasn’t possible in RPG Maker 2000, short of many images representing individual frames of animation.

I eventually got the icons next to the items, but I didn’t like the item number being on the same line as the item name, so I decided to move it to the right panel since I didn’t have anything set for there.

For the moment though, I decided to work on getting pages of items to work. Although I could display how many pages the items were spread over, it would not shift between them.

Eventually I got the offset working for the page and different items could be shown depending on the page. And as you can see in the image, I added an output for the total number of the currently selected item that the player had.

I eventually planned to put stats on the right hand panel along with a larger image of the item selected, but never got around to it.

The default RPG Maker 2000 menu was too limited in what it could do, so after a bit of researched, I thought up a way of using the available functionality to create my own menu when escape was pressed.

At first I borrowed  the text for level and exp. As for the menu items, due to the custom battle system, I could change the equipment system, as well as add additional features such as Gardua (the summons).

I think at the time I used Final Fantasy 6 or 7 as a basis for the menu options.

My Custom Battle System advanced a bit further to the point where EXP was attainable, and based on my level-exp system ( level = pow(exp+1, 1/3), expforlevel = pow( level, 3 ) – 1 ), I was able to output levels, and based on that and additional attributes, I could output HP and MP.

Now monsters in my C.B.S could drop money and items, and based on whatever map you were current on, a variable was set that I could now query to get the location.

Incase your trying to make your own C.M.S, the individual numbers being outputted were determined by integer division and modulus, so if you had a number 921, the 9 is gotten by dividing by 100, the 2 is gotten by modulus of 100 dividing by 10, and the 1 by modulus of 10.

Finally I refined the menu, to be slimmer and to only show menu options when they were available instead of the “???” system. As well as this, depending on the number of players, only a certain number of player panels are visible.

I decided that the level didn’t need to be shown anymore, so I removed that, the only place it is visible now is on the status screen for players.

The colour of the menu is just two different images, which can be alternated in the configuration menu. For finishing touches, the arrow used on the main menu was changed for something smaller.