Debug Log File Plugin for RPG Maker MZ

I took a break from working on the menus in The Note Competition remake to make my own plugin for logging data. This was a bit of a sidetrack, so while it was in that project file, it's not officially core to the development, but something I thought would be useful to implement! This is a pretty text-heavy post, so be ready to see some code and not a lot of visuals.

I wanted to create a plugin that could be useful for playtesting and when players demo the game down the line. Information like play time, characters they chose, etc. I'll have more data like variable values likely in here too, but trying to print some basic data. So I started by creating a basic script like I did in #No_Hacks where it prints information to a log txt file. This was just to get the numbering set up and basic text in a text file.

Then I created a while loop where I check if a log number exists, then I iterate up by 1. This way, it could make a new log file for each time it fires.

Then I had to dive deeper into how to detect if the window is closed. I found this forum post where Caethyril details the code on how to create a custom handler to override the default close function. I started with their code just to get it functioning with my current code, then simplified it later.

Then I customized it a bit and moved it into its own function to make it a bit more readable for myself and my specific code. I was also turning this into a common event so I could have it running at all times to check.

I wanted to decide what data is printed in the file, so I created a new script command to store what's in that multi-line variable string. I tested adding some variables and data from RPG Maker in there and eventually added some extras like playtime and current team (which in this game is stored in the first party member's equipment).

It was starting to be a lot of code in these tiny script commands, so I figured because I had recently been learning about how to make a plugin for a different project, that I would turn this into a plugin. Then I could manipulate the data a bit more. So I started by copying all of my code from the first script command into a plugin and reformatting it. From there, I got it all working as a plugin that references that variable. I was having some trouble with some of the scoping, but eventually was able to turn this into a couple of functions to make it easier to look at.

The next step was just converting what was in my script command to set up the variable with plugin commands to make it a little easier on myself for editing what prints, so I wouldn't have to come back into this common event. I decided to store all of the data just in the plugin and then make plugin parameter settings where you can turn these on or off individually. I was going to have users be able to input that data themselves, but it was getting a bit complicated and I honestly will probably just use this internally anyways, so I decided to keep it all within the plugin itself. So I spent some time adding help files and parameters that you could turn on or off.

I had a lot of fun towards the end adding a bunch of parameters and seeing what data might be most useful to print. With the ability to turn them on and off, I figured I could add some that might be useful in some of my projects but not in others. I'm sure I'll continue to add to this list as I think of more parameters to add, but for now I'm calling it done! So below is the log folder with one of the log files opened.

And then because I spent so much time on polishing this plugin up, I decided to officially publish it on itchio! You can download it yourself here and use it in your projects.

So with that, I can officially say that I've finished my first RPG Maker plugin! I did a lot of research and was working on some various other plugins for this project and another one before this, but those were a lot more of learning experiences with a lot of stitched together code. For this, I feel like I understand what everything's doing fully and was able to write it on my own without a lot of coding references, and mostly core RPG Maker and JavaScript code. So I'm happy that I was able to finally do it! I've been wanting to make a plugin for awhile, so this was finally my leap into making one. And I'm hoping it'll be helpful to use across multiple projects. Maybe someone else will even find it useful for their projects too!

I know this blog post was definitely more technical and text-heavy than I usually do without many visuals (and the visuals were just more text!). But thanks for reading through my programming journey on making this plugin! 

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.

CUPdate 90: Mr Marcus World Continuation

This is a shorter blog post, but it's a continuation of my earlier blog post here revolving around a Nay event that we've been doing recently: Return to Mr Marcus World.

My brother and I wrote the Mr Marcus World Eventure. It was a bit shorter, so we finished it within a few hours one Saturday. We now only have 1 more Eventure to write until we can skip ahead to writing Eventure 26 because of how many early Tag World Eventures we've already written.

Then it was only fitting to do the Mr Marcus World activity after that! We just did 1 round which was drawing one of our characters with a background character we hadn't drawn yet. So for the first one, I drew Clove and then a character who doesn't actually ever appear, Cabrinth. She's a wanted demon that Kali sees in a newspaper.

I also drew Jennie with Gardo. These two have probably actually met before because Jennie and Gojo are on the same hockey team. Gojo's dad is Gardo.

This has been a fun on-going activity and one of our favorites for drawing and random creative events that involve The Nays. We can usually do one or two of these activities in a day too, so it's an on-going one that we can come back to if we want to do a quick creative event. We still have a lot more since we just started this one, so I'll probably have those results in some future posts!

The Note Competition Remake Devlog 1: RPG Maker MZ Updates & Optimization

So after attending the GDEX (Game Developer Expo) in Columbus, my brother and I were very inspired to make games. After seeing all of the indie developers with tables, showcasing their games, we also thought it'd be cool to do that some day with one of our own games. We haven't released any of our personal projects commercially, and we've just had them all on itchio for free. But we were thinking it would be fun to use one of our existing games as a starting point, and then expand upon it and publish it to Steam.

From there, we were playing our game jam projects and I was taking notes on areas each of them could expand or improve. Many of them were contained within the project because we intended them to be short, so expanding some of them might've felt unnecessary. We thought about World Bub mainly because it's the most fun to play and our best one, but it's also really the one that's most complete.

So then we decided on the one that was the least complete and the most prototype-like: The Note Competition.

This was our first time making a game that was very different from the several mini-games formula that our previous ones had been. You can check out my portfolio page for it here and read the devlog, watch the dev vlog, and even play the original game for yourself there.

But basically, it had a lot of potential to be something bigger and was the start of our more ambitious game jam projects. So this seemed like a really great place to start.

This was also our last game jam project that we made in RPG Maker MV. So I started by converting the project to MZ, as we wanted to ensure we were using updated plugins that we were used to and just all of the overall improvements that MZ offers. It was pretty straightforward to copy the events over.

The main area that didn't fully copy over was the plugins. So I updated the title screen to use the new title screen plugins. The title screen was one of the aspects I liked most at the time because it was the first time I really did something different. So I was glad to get that working. We might change some aspects of it once the game is finished, but the functionality is there.

The rest of the plugins were for areas of the game that might change anyways, so I didn't want to spend too much time on updating those areas. I took a lot of notes on areas we could be more efficient with our code and overall process, so I imagine a lot of this will be reworked anyways. I played around a bit with zoom scripts because one of the areas I wanted to improve was on the art direction for this game. The sprites are currently pretty small, which makes them hard to see, so I thought maybe a zoom plugin could fix that. None of them really worked how I wanted, so I decided just doubling the sprite size is likely the way to go. I might redraw a lot of the sprites anyways, so I can just create the new ones at a larger resolution in the end anyways.

From there, I went on a sidetrack and figured out how to event my own local multiplayer system! I was looking for plugins and couldn't find any that did local multiplayer, just a couple for online. I found 1 but it was a paid plugin for commercial use, so it motivated me to figure it out on my own. At first I was using different common events for each keyboard press, but then I realized you could actually hard code keys in conditional statements with Caethyril's Keyboard Inputs plugin.

So I started with basic movements with the IJKL keys. Then I used a combination of conditional statements and JavaScript code to check if the event was facing a specific event and would start that event's code if it was. I had to do some precautions to activate a self switch and use a switch so they couldn't move during the conversation, and so it didn't activate twice.

So after that sidetrack, I did some brainstorming and came up with a new direction for this game. Instead of it being The Note Competition and about repairing the Party Place, I thought about the game USA Jr that they would compete in within Tag World. It's usually part of the Master Bird Tournament, so I thought it made sense that this could be around that game and with a Tag World theme instead. This could also add more mechanics like choosing party members and having different abilities. So I thought about how to rename it to make it make more sense. I thought about acronyms that would be fitting for Tag World, so like BIRD or WING. I decided it'll probably be WING and stand for Warrior, Investigator, Nay, Guard. These are the different positions they can have.

So from there, I decided to dive back into the original game and how it was laid out. I knew we would still be using some of the same functionality like spawning items in a region, so I fixed that mechanic using the VisuStella Events Move Core. It was very straightforward to get it all set up!

I also knew we would be using health bars again, so I updated that visual using our previous projects like World Bub as a guide. I even simplified the code a bit and then also added our specific features like showing a character picture depending on the state and changing the visual of the base.

The next big task was optimization. We hard coded a lot of areas to work for just this one battle. As you do with game jams and time constraints! So I wanted to work on really streamlining this so it'd be a lot easier for us to reuse the same map and just pull data from the enemies and your party so we could really just plug and play with it all set up. I used a combination of World Bub, Compass Nays, and Biggert City Battle Show as my inspiration on how I wanted to set up my events. I was actually pleasantly surprised with how organized I was in the Biggert City Battle Show code, so it was really easy to parse through and reuse.

While optimizing the code, I wanted to change the resources in the corner to use text instead of typing it on the image so it'd be a little easier to update and change later in the engine. I spent way too much time trying to figure out how to center the text, because the ExtraWindow plugin wasn't playing nicely with the VisuStella Message Core plugin. So eventually I just modified the ExtraWindow plugin to include a new switch that you can choose to center the text. This will be useful for future games, and maybe even within this one, so I was glad that I spent the time on it.

I optimized various other areas as well, such as which sprites show up on the map, images that are displayed, etc. I also spent some time making classes for the characters and pulling data like attack stats, HP, etc. so it'd be easier to control from 1 area.

I was slowly deconstructing our code from 5 years ago to really just modernize it with how I make projects today. There are still some areas I need to update, but a lot of those are really specific to the mechanics. So I didn't want to dive too deep there until we figure out if we're still using those mechanics for the new gameplay style. So I want to think through that a bit more before getting too deep into that. So far it's been fun to really update all of this.

I'm looking forward to making more updates to the game in terms of mechanics, story, look, and more!

Nay 50 Project: Outlaw Bar Bowling

My brother and I spent another day on our Nay50 Unity project. This time we only made one mini-game, but it was a lot more involved than the previous ones were. It was "created by" Hannah and Elfno.

This one's called Outlaw Bar Bowling, where you have to bowl for bottles of different drinks, and whichever ones you hit, you get to take with you into a drink mixing menu. When you mix drinks, you get different types of power-up balls with different abilities. We were very ambitious with this one, so we didn't actually finish all of these plans that we were hoping to. But we made quite a bit in the ~12 hours that we worked on it.

I started with the Unity project on the drink mixing menu. I created a drink script that first checks for the name of the object and checks which drink number it is based on that, so it can show or hide the drink, depending on if you got it or not. I really wanted to focus on optimizing here so this could be reused for all 5 drinks.

From there, I made something happen if you clicked the specific drink. I learned a bit about the new Unity input system for mouse clicks with this. Because this involves mixing 2 drinks, I checked if less than 2 drinks were selected, then you could continue to select them and it would show text under it to indicate which drink number it was. Otherwise, it brings up text that instructs you to mix them.

I also realized I needed some kind of Game Manager to make sure it could communicate between scenes and different objects. So I started with a manager for the scene, but then I ended up splitting it into 2 files in the end. The first is one that controls what happens when you click the mix button and which drink is shown. I had to make 10 different combinations of drinks and show results based on that.

At this point, the art was pretty rough and just shapes, but I was laying everything out on a canvas and where it would go.

Then I ended up splitting up my GameManager, like I mentioned. I needed a simple one that just tracks what the status of all of the booleans are. That way, it could move between scenes and save that data. I also had to dive into learning about persistence of game objects between scenes.

So with that, the whole drink mixing mechanics worked mechanically! I mainly had the art left for this scene.

I also made a simple script for transferring between scenes so we could reuse it later. I made a new 3D scene and used simple buttons to give you two of the drinks, then switch to the next scene. So this was able to work and all set up for the bowling part to be started!

During this time, my brother was working on 3D modeling the bowling scene. This included the lane, the "pins" (bottles), and the ball. So I gave the project to him for starting on programming the bowling part.

And in that time, I started to work on the labels for the drinks that he made, in Photoshop. I stayed pretty simple and just wrote the names of the drinks, added some colors/effects, and used some art I already had of all of the characters they were centered around. I haven't done a lot of work with drawing materials for 3D models, so it was fun to try it out.

I ended up making a few extra elements like adding Hannah to the drink mixing screen and Elfno to the bowling screen. My brother was working on the throwing mechanic, and it turned out to be a lot more complicated than we thought. So I started to help out and we were troubleshooting together. The main issue ended up being the transition to the new Unity input system and how little resources were out there to help with it. We finally got it to be thrown in 1 direction and not at a crazy high speed, but it still has a lot of work to do.

So after that, I started to import the final art assets I had been working on. This included the labels for all of the bottles and a skybox for the background.

I also added Elfno to the canvas for the bowling scene. I was thinking we could use that area for adding points of some kind down the line also. I made it a bit off-centered so it would give us more space to add parts to the UI.

Then I took screenshots of all of the bottles and erased their backgrounds so they could be used in the drink mixing menu. I also added my drawing of Hannah and background. Through this scene, I learned a lot about scaling for canvases, which is still a bit confusing at times.

So with that, that's as far as we got in the day of working on it! We realized this was a much bigger project so that we should probably scope down, especially on the 3D projects, because they involve a lot more physics and mechanics in the coding side of things. So I decided to revisit it the next day and look into some fixes. I did a lot of research to essentially redo the whole throwing mechanic. I also added a lot of features like adding points, making bottles disappear when you hit them (and turn the booleans on), and remove the ball when it reaches the end.

Originally my button to the next scene only worked once as well. I ended up completely redoing how it was set up because it seems like the Unity events may not be as reliable as hard coding the button presses. So I updated how they worked and it overall fixed the issue I was having. I'm still not a fan of using strings instead of objects for it, but I couldn't really find a better solution without using external packages for it. So that's how it'll be for the time being.

So overall, I spent about 4 more hours on this project after our original day to just fix it up and do some polish. I really wanted to fully make use of that drink mixing scene that I made, so I was determined to get this all working and turned into an actual game. So definitely our most ambitious game for this project so far, but I'm happy with how it turned out! 

Nay 50 Project: Dump Typing & Harrugh Ball

My brother and I started a fun little project inspired by UFO 50, which we're placeholder calling "Nay 50". The idea is that we came up with a bunch of mini game ideas (up to 50) about The Nays. We're also making them as if the characters themselves made them, which is adding a lot more flavor and personality to the presentation and contents of each game.

Because we're coming up with a large variety of gameplay styles, we decided this project would be best in Unity. Starting out, we're only spending about 4-6 hours on each game so we can get through more of them and mainly have quick prototypes done for this project. The first day of this project, we worked on 2 games.

Dump Typing 

The first game we worked on is currently called "Dump Typing". This game is "created by" Pigger and Boney, two of the leaders of the group of orphans. In this game, there are prompts related to the orphans (names and phrases) that pop up, and you must type the word(s) correctly to move the character Chila forward, when racing against Boney.

With this project, I focused on the programming, while my brother focused on the art. I started earlier by making our Unity project with GitHub so we could have version control and easily share it. I haven't really worked on many personal projects in Unity, and it's been a bit since I made a project that used C# (since my previous project at work used Visual Scripting), so it started out by remembering where things were and refreshing my knowledge. I also coded in VS Code rather than Microsoft Visual Studio for the first time with Unity, and I can say that I definitely prefer it overall.

Even though the art in this one is 3D, we made a 2D scene and used 2D exported sprites. I started with the typing mechanic. I hadn't used player inputs by typing before in Unity, so I researched that a bit and used an input field. It looked a little different layout-wise when I was initially testing, compared to the screenshot below, but this is how the final UI layout looks now.

From there, I made a function that changes the text that you must type, depending on a variable. After you press Enter, it checks if you matched the text, switches to the next one.

I set up a timer and sound effects for if the text was correct. I was glad that changing the color and text itself was only 1 line of code each!

Then I set up the movement code. Because Boney moves automatically and Chila only moves when you type the correct prompt, I made separate movement scripts for each of them. This meant also setting up some code to make them stop moving if one of them has reached the end.

While I was writing all of this code, my brother was 3D modeling the characters and background. He exported them out as 2D spritesheets and implemented the animations in Unity. I replaced my placeholder shapes with his final art in Unity and restructured how the whole screen was set up based on that.

And with that, we wrapped up the Dump Typing game! It still has a few areas we'd like to update and fix up, but overall, we spent about 5 hours on the game. So I'm happy with how much we got done in that time. 

Harrugh Ball

The second game is currently called "Harrugh Ball". It's a little dodgeball game that takes place in the desert. This was "created by" Subeebia and Baw, and the idea is that it'll be the Little Kids against monkeys. We only got to making 2 of the players facing against each other for now though.

In this project, I focused on the art while he focused on the programming I started by sketching out a basic layout for the scene in Photoshop. Starting with a sketch to get down the placement and size of the characters. We weren't planning to have a camera that moves, so focusing on getting everything in the 1920x1080 space was how I scaled it out.

Then I started with the background so he could figure out the collisions and space for the mechanics while programming. I made a bunch of different layers so we could do some parallaxing with some of the elements in the foreground or background.

After handing those over, I moved on to drawing the characters. I wanted to have multiple poses like idle, walking, and throwing, but I didn't want to spend too much time drawing a lot of different poses for this little project. So I decided to draw each part on different layers and basically rig the movements to make it faster. I started with the player character, Subeebia.

Then I was going to animate the character in a software called Spriter Pro, but I hadn't used it before and wasn't really sure where to get started because their tutorials were fairly sparse.

I decided to just use something I was a bit more familiar with instead: Adobe Animate. I started with Subeebia's animations and basically imported each part as its own layer, and then motion tweened them to make subtle movements. With Unity, I could have a lot of layers without needing to worry about frames as much. So I started with the throw animation.

I tried out using scenes so I could reuse the same symbols for multiple different animations. It worked out really well. I just ended up having to re-export since it did export all of the scenes rather than one at a time like I was hoping. I also updated the export settings for including transparency, since that didn't work initially at first.

Then I repeated those steps for Baw and eventually had 3 animations done for each character. My brother imported the animations into the game as well.

While I was working on the art, he got player movement down and then also mechanics to pick up the dodge balls that appear in random positions and throwing them. So the basics are there! I was doing some extra art like for the dodge balls, finding music and sound effects, a font, and some other visuals while he was working on this.

So that was it for this Harrugh Ball game! This one was a bit bigger than the previous one, so it took closer to 6 hours for us to put together, but it was all done in 1 night. So I'm happy with where we ended up here too!

And that's it for these first 2 games that we made! I really enjoyed this project, so I'm looking forward to making more of these. We planned about 30-40 mini game ideas. I'm not sure how many we'll get through, and they definitely aren't as in-depth as what you'd see in UFO 50, but it's a fun side project that's been a lot of fun to work on.