[RMMV] ITEM ACQUISITION ANIMATION

There's multiple ways, the way I'd do it is a battle animation with the item sprite going up in the air and having the charset actually animate along with it. Other methods would involve stuff like Show Picture commands but this method is serviceable enough.

First you'd want to do it in a common event (look in the database for the tab) so you can call it whenever you want using Flow Control: Common Event(page1) in regular events on the map.

For the first command in page2 Character: Show Animation... put the animation of the fruit going up in the air (might need to figure out how the battle animation editor works and how to put the fruit in a proper battle animation sheet with only one image). Make sure wait for completion is OFF, we'll want the character to do an animation at the same time.

Next part you'll want to do Movement: Set Movement Route (page2) on the player and then use Change Image to another character set. The art part of this is making the animation of the character putting their arms up in the air through various FACINGS for example (facing down is frame 1, facing right is frame 2, facing left is frame 3) so in the Set Movement Route list you'll want to use the turn down/left/right/up commands in the second column. If you want more than 4 frames you simply just switch to another "character". You'll probably want to put some wait commands inbetween the turns so it doesnt zip by instantly. You can also abuse the stepping animation to do simple animation loops for other stuff.

Something like this is what the result will look like:

Add a message and giving the item or whatever fluff you want. You may need to adjust the wait timings a bit to get the classic Zelda feel you're likely going for or add in sound effects or whatever. Also you'll probably have to switch the character's image back to normal after.

Now to make a different item appear each time will require an additional step. So with the default fruit animation simply copy paste the battle animation in a bunch of slots in the database. Then change the actual source image to something else for each one. This way you'll preserve the going up in the air animation. It does require making a separate image for each item however.

We're now going to need a variable that will hold an id of the item that you just got, we'll call it ItemGivenID. This is the variable that will decide which animation plays based on which item you want to give, and will also determine which item actually is given. So for example in a typical event like a treasure chest, you'll want to set the ItemGivenID variable to the item you want to give, we'll assume the fruit item is in slot 1 of the database. Then we'll put in the commonevent call for the thing we just did. So whenever you make an event that gives you an item, you'll have to set the id to the number you want to give and call the common event (easy to copy paste and edit that way).



So going back to the common event we made before. We're going to want to change the animation, the message, and the actual item given all based on a single variable. So we're going to use Flow Control: Conditional Branch in page 1, and set it to ItemGivenID, and constant = 1, then copy paste the battle animation inside of it so it looks like this:



The character animation will be the same regardless of the item we picked up so we'll leave it alone. As for the message, we'll be doing the same thing we did with the battle animation. You can just copy paste the conditional branch you made before, delete the battle animation command and paste the message in there. As for giving the actual item to put in the inventory... well... MV doesn't have a command for giving you an item id based on a variable. So I'm going to drop a bit of scripting on you. Simply go to Advanced: Script... on page 3 and add then change X to the ItemGivenID variable number (as in the number of the variable) and Y for the amount you wanna give (just put 1 for now). It should look something like this:



Now whenever you want to add a new item to the game, just copy paste the coneditional branches you made and change the values (right click on any command to see the hotkeys such as space to edit ctrl c to copy etc.). If you're having problems with the scripting command you can also add each item under each new conditional branch as well. It's just nice to do everything in one single command when you can.

So you'll have something like this:



It's a bit messy and there are ways to condense this a little better but if you're just starting out and figuring out the usefulness of conditional branches and common events this should be serviceable. Make sure to use Flow Control Comment(page1) if you want to put in notes to remember what you did.

Let me know if something doesn't make sense or if something doesnt work (I only tested this like once and didnt do any art for the example)

If you only want one frame of animation then yes you would only need one facing. But the reason why I'm doing different facings is to not really make the character face in different directions per say, but just use it as frames of animation if that makes sense. You could just swap different parts of the charset, but it would be a waste of space if you left the 3 other rows of sprites empty.

Here's an example (it's for rpgmaker2003 but the principle is the same)

The character walking animation sheet (known as img/characters in resources) is the template you'd want to work with for the actual character animations. The Battle Animation is just for the item itself to appear over the character. So when I say animation I meant in a general sense unless I'm referring to Battle Animation in particular.

With the Change Image in Set Movement Route you can switch over to another character slot and cycle the facing from there. Say you have an 8 frame animation you want to do, you can just use another set over and Turn down, turn left, turn right, turn up over and over.


edit: To be clear you're not using the "stepping" frames in the walking sheet, you're just using the static standing frames for poses. It's a bit unothordox but it's the way to change the characters sprite without any plugins needed.

Actually you can decide how long each "facing" lasts with the Wait command in the Move Route and can set the amount of frames (5 frames being an example in my tutorial).