Now that I’ve got the menu system written, I’m going back to coding the event system. The features planned for this week’s release are going to be two rather complex event commands, and in a bit of a break from tradition, neither of them will work exactly as they worked in RPG Maker 2000.
First, shopping. The shopping event code has already been implemented as a do-nothing command in order to fix another bug. Now that I’ve got a working menu system, I can build on that code base to build shops. But the shopping system will include one thing that, in my opinion, is an essential feature whose absence from RPG Maker greatly hindered gameplay: the ability to access the “Equip” menu from within the shopping system.
The other event command will be the one to input hero names. This command is badly broken in RPG Maker’s English translation, trapping the player in an input box that it’s impossible to leave, because the program was designed for the Japanese language, which for technical reasons handles letters on a computer in a different way than we’re used to. I’m going to design this in English, but in such a way that translating it to run properly in other languages shouldn’t cause compatibility problems.