Part 14: Behind The Fangs: Part 0 - Non-Essential Party Members

Well, people aren't running away screaming, so that's a good sign.

So like I said, if you have any particular bits and pieces you want me to rip apart, make sure you tell me!


I think I can give a bit of a teaser here, so I guess we can kick this off officially.

Behind The Fangs: Part 0 - Non-Essential Party Members

Turning people into vampires is a system that will have an entire tutorial dedicated to it, so we'll get into the nitty-gritty then. However, non-essential party members are a fairly simple concept I can explain right now.

There's a thing in RPG Maker called "common events", which are essentially global functions - code snippets that are available at all times that you aren't in battle. For an example... well, remember how we could select the text box we wanted and how it will appear in the beginning of the game? That's actually not something the engine can support, so Marlex had to find a workaround for that. He did that with common events - he made a common event to display a text box, and a common event that makes the text box go away. Then he has to put that in every time a text box is supposed to appear and disappear, which happens every time the speaker changes in dialogue. It's a lot, basically.

Now, there are three types of common event - "call", "auto start" and "parallel process". Furthermore, common events can have a "trigger switch". To sum up quickly:

- "Call" is only activated when the code explicitly calls for it. Hence the name. An example would be the process that is called whenever you find a secret - it generates a random item for you to find.
- "Auto start" is activated the moment the trigger switch is set. For instance, the item we use to open the menu actually only flips the switch for the menu, and then the common event takes over.
- Finally, "parallel process" is constantly active whenever common events are available if the trigger switch is set. If the process doesn't have a trigger switch, it just runs constantly (except in battle).

Remember, it said that characters die permanently if they are dead/in Rigor *at the end of the battle*. And now you know why! It's because the common event that removes the party member from your party permanently can't fire in battle! Now, I thought that removing the dead party members would be a parallel process, but it actually isn't, it's a call event. It's triggered every time you exit battle. So every time that big explosion is shown because we killed an enemy, the game is also running the event that removes dead non-essential party members from the party at the same time.

So that's the basics of a very minute part of gameplay, and it took me several paragraphs to explain. Aces.