I’m kicking off the actual design process with some of RPG Maker VX’s basic concepts. Everybody who has ever played a console RPG from the 1990s is used to the obligatory opening sequence, where the game introduces the player to the main characters, backstory and current events. Creating a complete opening sequence is a much longer process, and I’m going to get to it. But before I can tackle that topic, I need to provide a very basic example that a user of RPG Maker VX can build on to create longer, more complicated introductory and cut scenes.

This basic example explains how to create a “Character Naming” Event that allows the player to name his or her main character. By the way, I’m bolding words that appear for the first time that are actual commands used in RPG Maker VX. FYI, this first post covers a whole lot about using the RPG Maker VX interface. If you’re already familiar with it, what Events are and how Switches and Self Switches work, you might just want to skip to the very end of this post and read the summary. If you have no idea what you’re doing and want to learn the basics, keep reading.

Event Basics

Simply naming your character sounds like it would be extraordinarily simple to set up, and it is pretty easy compared to many other operations in using the RPG VX engine. Before doing so, however, you need to understand what Events are and how they function in the game. From there, we can start talking about Switches, which are the next crucial concept to understand. We’ll get to things like Variables, Labels, Loops and Conditional Branches later. All of these things sound complicated, but they’re pretty easy to understand if you can see examples of how they are used, and I plan to provide plenty of screenshots to illustrate how they work in future posts.

So, what are Events? They are collections of actions, images and operations that a user designates. In other words, Events are how you make just about everything happen in the game, from dialogue and opening doors with items to cut scenes and the operation I’ll be talking about in a bit, naming your character.

To get started placing events, you need to have created a Map. I’ll offer a basic tutorial on mapping in future posts, but it’s pretty easy to figure out for anyone who has used any kind of game editor in the past. For now, once you’ve created a new Project, you’ll see a green box and a named map below it. This first map is called MAP001. If you can’t find it, look at the lower left-hand side of the screen under the folder called whatever you named your project (and if you didn’t name it, it’s called Project 1).

Anyway, draw some stuff on the map by selecting some tiles in the window on the left-hand side of the screen and then place them on the map (which initially displays a sea with no land; I’ve added a bunch of grass tiles to create a simple island). Here’s a screen cap to illustrate what I’m talking about (click on it to get some basic instructions about map making; also on that page you can click on the image itself to see a full-screen version). Note that in my screen cap, it says Project 3. This is because this is the third Project I’ve created (and I made Project 3 to demonstrate concepts and operations in RPG Maker VX just for this blog):

Once you’ve got a map, you’re ready to start creating Events. You do this by clicking on the Mode command on the upper-left-hand side of the main editor (which is the screen the program opens to after you start the program and get past the title image) and then in the Mode drop-down menu select “Events.” You will see a light grid appear on the map. You place Events by adding them to specific grid squares on a given map. Here’s another screen cap to illustrate this step:

To create an Event, right-click on one of the squares on the grid (in this case, it doesn’t matter where the Event is because it’s not going to be something on the map that the character will interact with; it will be an operation that allows the player to name the main character), and select “New Event.”

The screen below will appear. I call this screen the Event Editor. There isn’t any real English-language documentation for RPG Maker VX (at least not yet), so this box doesn’t have an official name as far as I can tell. Click on the thumbnail to get a better view of what the screen looks like if you’re not currently working in RPG Maker VX.

At first, it looks pretty intimidating. Compared to actually coding a whole game like this yourself in a programming language, however, it’s pretty easy to get the hang of. Still, it does take some getting used to. The Event Editor offers a huge array of options that will take you at least a few days to figure out. Learning to use them, and use them well, will take a while longer. Although this program is incredibly easy to use to build your own RPGs, it still takes time, effort and a whole lot of knowledge to build a great game.

Note that although the Event Editor window has the same menu every time, each event is a separate object in the game that you can interact with. You can copy and paste Events anywhere on a map and onto new maps that you create. You can do this by either right-clicking on an existing Event (represented by a shaded square on the map; it will display some kind of graphic if you’ve selected a graphic for the Event, e.g. with non-player characters, NPCs from here on out) or by holding down the control (ctrl) key and hitting “c,” just like you would in most Microsoft programs. You can place it by holding down control and hitting the “v” key. Also note that if at any point you leave the Event Editor, you can right-click on the shaded square for an event and click on “Edit Event,” which appears in bold type, to get back to the Event Editor.

Creating the Character Naming Event

Okay, so let’s create our character naming Event. First thing’s first, you should probably name your Event. You do this by typing in a new name for the Event in the field titled “Name” in the upper-left-hand corner of the Event Editor. Next, you need to add a second page to the Event Editor. You do this by clicking on the button at the top of the Event Editor that says “New Event Page.” This will create a second blank page in this Event Editor.

Let’s talk about Pages for a moment. When I first starting using this program, I had absolutely no idea what the heck Pages were used for. After reading many, many posts on a variety of forums, I learned that Pages are used to designate which specific operations the RPG Maker VX engine will evaluate (i.e. read and then do) in a set order. Now, this next part is important, the engine evaluates the pages in order from the highest page number to the lowest. The order the engine reads the Pages in is the opposite of what I think makes sense, but oh well. Anyway, if you have 3 Pages, the engine will evaluate Page 3 first, then Page 2, then Page 1. This is an important concept to understand because if you don’t get the Event Commands (i.e. the specific commands that tell the engine what to do) on the right pages, in the right order, your Event will not work properly, if at all.

Okay, so the third thing we do is go back to Page 1 and enter a command into the currently empty list of Event Commands (called the “List of Event Commands” appropriately enough) on the right-hand side of the Event Editor by right-clicking on one of the lines. Again, make sure you’re on Page 1 when you do this. For this specific Event we’re creating, we want the Engine to evaluate what’s happening on this Page last, hence we put it on Page 1. Each line is preceeded by the @ symbol and an arrow > (it looks like @>). A little menu will appear that says “Insert” in bold type and a few other options like copy, paste, etc. Here’s yet another screen cap:

Select Insert and a new menu will come up. I call this menu the Events Commands Editor (the label in the box says “Events Commands” at the top). This is where you make just about everything in a given Event happen. To continue, look for the three tabs labeled 1,2,3 on the upper-left-hand side of the Events Commands Editor. Click on the third tab and then click the “Name Input Processing” button under the “Scene Controls” section of the menu on that page. This next screen cap shows you what this looks like:

Next, you want to set the first Page of this Event to Autorun. What is Autorun? This means that the Event will start by itself and run without any input from the player. You can find this option on the bottom of the Event Editor menu on the left-hand side. There’s a drop-down menu you can click on that says “Trigger.”  Screen cap for this tk.

Now, the only problem with Autorun is that it’s basically a Loop. A Loop is an operation that will keep repeating itself forever. So what will happen if you have an Event set to Autorun in this case? The “insert name” box will pop up on the screen, and even though you’ve hit the “OK” button to confirm your name choice, the box will pop right back up again and ask you input the name again. Also, Autorun freezes your character in place while it performs whatever commands you’ve designated for a given Event. So now we need to get the Autorun Event to stop. You do this with a switch.

On to Switches. there are two kinds of switches in RPG Maker VX: regular Switches and Self Switches. Anyone using this program can set each type of switch to one of two modes: On or Off. Setting a switch to one or the other tells the game to DO SOMETHING on the page where the switch is set, depending on what you’ve set the switch to.

This means the engine evaluates the Event Commands in the List of Event Commands on that page. For example, if you’ve set a switch to “On,”and you tell it to display text, whenever you have a Page in an Event with the switch being listed as “On,’ the engine will display text when it reads that line in the Event.

In this case, what we want to do is create a Self Switch that will tell the engine to do nothing, and therefore stop our Input Name Processing command from looping forever. To explain further, a Self Switch is a switch that applies whatever Event Commands you’ve assigned it to only that specific Event. You can create other types of Switches that you can make accessible, and applicable if you want, globally, that is to any new Event you create. The switches are on the left-hand side of the basic Event Editor menu. This next screen cap shows you where they are:

So, to continue, right-click on the second line in the List of Event Commands under the “Input Name Processing” command (which you can see listed in the screen cap above). The command we’re going to insert is on the first tab of the Events Commands Editor in the Game Progression menu, which is mid-way down the menu on the left-hand side. Here’s a screen cap:

Next, you want to click the “Control Self Switch” button in that menu, and when the next button comes up that indicates that the Self Switch is “On,” click the OK button. A new line in red that says “Control Self Switch A: =On” will appear in the List of Event Commands below the line that says “Input Name Processing.” And another screen cap:

Okay, so Page 1 of this Event is done. If this seems like it’s taking forever, it’s because I’m trying to explain key concepts as we go. Don’t worry, I’ll include a summary of the steps at the end of this post.

On to Page 2 of this Event. Making Page 2 work is easy. First, click on the tab to get to Page 2 of this Event. Next, check the box next to “Self Switch A is On.” Leave the List of Event Commands blank. For this Event the Trigger can just be “Action Button,” which is the default setting. That will make sense in a second. That’s pretty much it for the whole event. To recap:

Now, let me explain what we just did in terms of how the engine is interpreting our Event. So why did we turn Self Switch A on and tell it to do nothing on that page? We want the program to evaluate Page 2 first. That Page lists “Self Switch A = On” and nothing else. This means Page 2 is telling the RPG Maker VX engine “When Self Switch A is on, do nothing from that point forward!” So that’s the first thing the engine evaluates. The reason the Trigger doesn’t matter is because nothing happens on Page 2, so the Trigger doesn’t affect anything.

Next, on Page 1, which gets evaluated second, the engine is reading the line that says “Input Name Processing,” which tells it to bring up the “insert name” box that allows the player to name the main character. Great. The line after that is “Control Self Switch: A = ON.” That tells the engine to turn Self Switch A on and do nothing (which is what we defined Self Switch A as doing on Page 2 of this Event). So, right after the player hits the OK button after inputting a name, Self Switch A gets turned on, and then the engine does nothing from that point forward, which stops the Autorun loop for Input Name Processing.

The whole process should happen as follows on-screen when you’re playtesting this: screen cap tk

Okay, here’s the summary of the process:

Character Naming Procedure

1. Right-click on the map and insert a new Event. Name it something like “Character Naming” at the top of the Event Editor.
2. Create a second Page for the Event by pressing the New Event Page button.
3. Go back to Page 1 and right-click on the List of Event Commands. This will bring up the Events Commands Editor.
4. Left-click on the third tab on the Events Commands Editor and look under the Scene Controls menu. Left-click on Input Name Processing and choose the maximum number of letters the player can use for the main character’s name. Click the Okay button.
5. Go down to the bottom-left-hand side of the Event Editor and under the Trigger drop-down menu, select Autorun.
6. Right-click again on the List of Event Commands and on tab 1 of the Events Commands Editor, look under the Game Processing menu. Choose the Control Self Switch option. Choose Self Switch A.
7. Go to Page 2 of this Event. On the left-hand side of the Event Editor, check the box that says “Self Switch A = ON.” Do nothing else on Page 2. Hit the “Apply” button and then OK to close out the Event Editor.
8. Playtest your game to make sure it works right. Check the screen captures above if you’re having trouble and make sure your screen looks the same.

So, I hope you enjoyed this first post about Events and how they function. Future posts will likely be shorter than this one, now that I’ve explained all the menus and how the interface works. If there are any topics you would like me to explain, or anything you’d like to read about that’s related to RPG Maker VX, feel free to enter a comment.