Has Anyone Ever Tried to Create A Game+ System?

[DerVVulfman]

Well, a friend of mine wanted something... entertaining.

She wanted to use an ABS for her combat system. Now an ABS (or Active Battle System) is basically ZELDA or DIABLO or whatnot... all the combat is on the map and you move your character all around dodging magic bolts lobbed at her. Yep, her. I could best describe the character lead as "Rukia Kuchiki" from Bleach, but with a spiritually conjured bow.

However, she wanted to give the player some ... grief. In every ABS system out there, the player could just up and cheat and hit ESC to bring up the menu and pause the game while in combat. Well, either that or work to ensure that the ESC button didn't work unless you were in a safe zone. But she was like "That gives too much away.". You knew you were safe if you could open the menu.

So Mister Bright-Idea here thought, why not make it so all the menu windows are actually brought up within the field map???

The basic principle of the default menu system is that when you enter a menu, you leave SCENE_MAP, the actual Scene/Engine that handles the field map. You actually EXIT the map, though game values of player position and such are memorized. Still, you leave it just the same and all actions are basically frozen. And when you decide to look at the Skiill Menu, you switch over to SCENE_SKILL and aren't even in SCENE_MENU.

Booooring. My idea was to just move all the mechanics into Scene_Map itself. When hitting ESC, you didn't leave the field map. You only turned on an in-map switch that brought up the "Window_Menu" and like screens. And while the menu was up, it would turn off the player's movement system and allowed cursor control. However, all map events would work just fine.

And if you were in combat.... you better be in that menu for a VERY short period of time. :D

SHE loved it.

Our friend Mark hated it. He was like "YOU TOOK OUT MY CHEAT!!!!!"