KING OF GAMES'S PROFILE

This is a very specific coding problem, so I'll break it down:

Setup
OK, so I am working on a minesweeper-esque mini-game in rm2k3/ I have everything coded exactly as I want it, but the flagging is giving me some trouble.

Basically, I have ambiguous tiled events, that can be called as flags, bombs or normal cells, each corresponding to their own action, since you can make any cell on the grid flagged. The max amount of flags is 5. I use a counter var on a loop to decide when you place a flag, which number are you placing, and then record those vars to the corresponding flag X and Y. Each flag is mapped to 2 switches, 1 turns on when you hover over its position with the cursor, the other one tests if there is a flag open in the loc of your cursor, it turns off that flag.

Problem
That much works fine so far. But the problem arises because of the linear creation of the flag placement. For example, if you place flags |1|-|2|-|3| and then erase flag 2, the code will be unsure which flag to place next because there is a gap. (even if flags aren't next to each other, all flags after the gap need to be erased to have the order/hierarchy stay intact.)

Tried Solutions
I have tried 2 solutions to this. The first one simply adds +1 or -1 at the end of each turn flag off case, which is fine for counting the amount of flags you have left/flags you have placed, but doesn't help the integrity of ordered hierarchy.

The 2nd solution I tried was a bit more complex. I basically used pointer vars, set them depending on which flag the cursor was on, and used temp vars to roll back the pointers by 2 (to hit the x/y of previous flag in var list) and test if those coords were 0, indicating a gap, that I could fill by branching. This theoretically should work but in testing has not helped.

Question
How do I make it so the flags can be placed/erased in any order? For ex. Placing flag 1-2-3-4, erasing 2-3 and then have the next flag placed be 2, then 3, then 5?

I'm making an input based mini game. It works like this, there's one master event set to autorun that calls the input generator (decides which key you have to press).

The Key Input Processing is set to wait until key is pressed, and stores the amount of time it takes to press the key.

Then it just branches to see if you pressed the right key in a fast enough time, which triggers bits of dialogue from the master autorun event. It works perfectly unless you press nothing.

My problem is this, I can't figure out how to erase the input generated if no keys are pressed. (wrong presses +1) It sounds simple in theory, to branch if the key press is 0, shut down the event and +1 to wrong presses. If I put a branch like this under the key input processing command, it won't do anything unless a key is pressed, which would have to be >0, so that portion of code never commences.

I've tried a couple theories, including separate pp/autorun events branching if key press is 0 after an allotted wait command. Does anyone have any ideas or theories about this? I know my RM very well, but this is a roadblock for me. I can post code if I have to. Thanks for any help.

So in rm2k3 I renamed the project folder outside of maker, and this deleted every event and graphic file. What?