EVENTED HOUSES

[DerVVulfman]

EVENTED HOUSES

Buy a house... buy furniture... enjoy your new home.

Within the gaming community, there would be very few that haven't ventured into large open-ended worlds. And a fair number of these worlds may give the player a fairly popular option... to purchase real estate.  Whether it be the Sims, the Elder Scrolls games (from Daggerfall and Oblivion to Skyrim) or even The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, one may perchance be able to acquire a home of their virtual dreams.

This demo depicts how one can use events to replicate the subtle 'purchase' of furniture within a player-bought home, as can be accomplished within games such as TES IV: Oblivion or TES IV: Skyrim.  It does not dwell upon building of an actual house, though such techniques COULD be used.



Demo

( The Demo )  -- Box.Com link
* When you click this, the resulting page will have the 'Download' button at the top of the window... towards the left.



Screenshots:

Three-in-one

The HEART of what is going on:

Essentially, the created 'house' map has a ton of events, and these events have pages tied to either an RPGMaker Switch or Variable.  And until it is turned on or increased, the event will appear blank and invisible.  I chose to use variables within this demo so one could purchase this clock or that clock, one of these selections of beds, and so on.  And for each furniture piece, I had need for an in-game variable.  These shown below:

0001: Bed
0002: Bookshelves
0003: Flooring
0004: Clock
0005: Curtains
0006: Kitchen
0007: Study/Office
0008: Bedroom

Again, I could have used switches, but opted for variables to allow variety. And the demo uses more than just these variables, but these were the most important. These variables were the ones that influenced the furniture events.

Now the demo uses more events and switches, but that includes allowing one entry into the house after it has been bought, turning on/off various events to simulate the environment, and values I came up with for a simple scripted furniture purchase system. 

And while the player may only purchase one house, there are four player-home maps in the demo. Each one has a different floor tile to allow the player to 'purchase' new flooring. When this is done, the outside house door can teleport the player to the proper house map with the proper flooring.  A simple tileset swap script can be employed and reduce the number of maps, but I kept the demo down to an absolute minimum with no scripts actually affecting the house and furniture within.



Commentary:

In the top-left corner of each map is an event.  Each event contains commentary on the map itself, its primary function within the demo and some content as to what is accomplished.  It isn't so much as instructions as it is hints.



What scripts ARE in use?

This demo did not focus upon script use, but eventing.  Still, some scripts were applied.

One script is a very comical addition to the Game_Character class entitled 'move_toward_the_baby'.  An edit/alteration of the 'move_toward_the_player' method, it is used by one event to follow a very specific map event, a fast little baby character crawling around the town park.

The second script is the 'Awesome "Show Choices"' script by Jimmy © 2009.  While the default RPGMaker system can show only four choices at a time, Jimmy's script allows one to break that limit, and I used it to display up to nine selections using event commands.  This was the only script used for the purchase of furniture, and not one that was even a necessity.

Again, I do wish to stress that these scripts are non-essential.  The magic is in the events and switches/variables in play.



What's with the town?

Um... well, it seemed stupid to just buy a house in the middle of no where.  So I made a map with a planned suburban community.  Still, I had to bring it to life.  Street names are based on real ones.  So yes, there really is a "Chicken Dinner Road" and a "Psycho Path" somewhere in the world.  And many of the NPCs were given names from some movies.  If no one gets the Beatrice Kiddo reference, they obviously never saw Kill Bill.