Day 5 (it is day 5, right?):
I solved a couple random coding problems and scripted up to the first battle sequence today, so all and all a productive day! Or more like a productive night, I did half my work in just the last two hours and now I desperately need to go to bed. Updates are as follows.
I added a bunch of events to the night version of my town map. The free version of RPGMaker only lets you include ten events per map, which I figured would be fine but now I totally see why someone would want more.
The major problem here was the fact that my two town 'exit' paths (the bottom right, which will at some point lead to the overworld map, and the middle left, which leads to the next part of my 'cutscene', are both two tiles wide. That meant that to use a single event per tile to block of an exit/transfer a player, I would need four different events. I have seven doors that need transfer events too (remember how I went a bit house-crazy on day 1?) so obviously that wasn't gonna work for me.
It took some time to figure out, but I finally realized I could use RPGMaker's region IDs to code the tiles in front of each exit. Then, within a single constantly-running background event, I have the program check to see if the player is on a tile marked with a specific region code. If they are, they're either blocked from going forward, or sent to the next map of the cutscene. Now I still have room for 2 more events on this page (and I started to get more ideas of how I might combine effects within a single event).
I, of course, had to create the next map for the cutscene as well. This is where the first battle takes place in the game, and I had to figure out how to make the different events work together to create the scene. It's a bit less imaginative as far as my maps go, but I really need to pick up the pace if I want to have more than this one scene scripted by the end of the jam.
Currently all the 'action' of this scene is scripted into a single event, set to autorun, moving the player and the NPC event into place as needed. It's a very long event script, I feel, but part of that is just how much space the movement commands take up.
After this point the player enters their first battle. Once the battle is won, the cutscene finishes, revealing to the player the full extent of their character's powers and what their goal for the rest of the game will be. My goal for tomorrow is to finish this scene completely - I still have a few extra events to script in, then the dialogue for the final scene. I really want to get to the 'next morning' bit, where I introduce the first companion character and finally give the player free control.