The Legend of Zelda: Forgotten Gates

Note: this post was intended for 2024-11-01, but RMN being down for an extended period prevented posting until now.

This month I finished up my rewrite of the high-level outline for the story's first arc, which ended up giving me some interesting ideas for mechanical uniquenesses in some of the early quests. :) Then I got to work on actually implementing the first quest. Naturally, this involved meeting up against some hurdles I'd only vaguely anticipated before. The main one was how to run cutscenes during a quest. Normally in RM2K3 you can just make whatever events you like and put scripting into one or more of them to make a scene play out, but since FG uses one BIG map full of one-screen rooms for all of the quests, I have to do things in a more modular way.

I eventually came up with the idea of having a variable holding the reference number of a common event used for special happenings in the current quest. I can set the variable to whatever it needs to be at the start of a quest, then call the common event at occasions when I might want to do something, like the start of the quest, the first time the player enters a particular room, or when a particular win condition has been fulfilled. In vanilla RM2K3 that would require having a bunch of conditional branches to call the right common event (or making the special handler events map events), but thanks to my first-created-and-still-favorite plugin DynParams, I can just call a common event by variable reference. ^.^ It took a while to get everything working right due to little details in my dungeon managing code that were easy to overlook when setting up a pre-constructed dungeon and a weird bug that interfered with text messages when skippable event movements were involved, but I finally managed to get the first quest working with a starting and an ending cutscene. I still intend to add some more cutscenes, and I should also work on a proper 'hub world' for entering individual quests.