RPG Maker MV: Mists of Tongass III

In Part II of our exploration of RPG Maker MV, we set up a “plot instigator” for our game Mists of Tongass. Our hero, Lucius York, discovered a letter from his grandpa explaining that he had been arrested for owing rent and sent to debtor’s prison. Most importantly, we learned how to create and edit events. Today we will be creating and fleshing out our town.

I don’t have time to create an entire town from scratch, but thankfully RPG Maker MV comes with several dozen premade locations. I chose “Forest Town” for the town exterior. Every building our hero will walk into needs an interior. Thankfully, there are premade interiors as well. You will need a Weapon Shop, Armor Shop, Item Shop, Inn, Tavern, and Jail interior at minimum. Oddly, there is no premade Tavern or Jail interior, but we’ll get to that later. There is also a magic shop on this map, but we won’t need that right now, so I will erase the bridge leading to that side of town.

How does our hero get from inside a building to the town exterior and vice versa? RPG Maker MV has also made that simple for us. RPG Maker provides several common events used frequently in a game. In event editing mode, simply right click on the map and scroll down to “Quick Event Creation.” The two we are most concerned with here are “Transfer” and “Door.” While in the York House, right click on the center tile at the bottom of the map and insert a Transfer.

A dialogue will pop up asking you to chose a location on the map. This is where our hero will exit the building.

Now, on the Forest Town exterior map, right click on the black tile where our hero will enter the house and select “Quick Event Creation” and then “Door.” This time, choose a location on the house interior. The stairs or just above the stairs will do nicely. If you did everything correctly, Lucius will now be able to walk into and out of his grandpa’s house.

RPG Maker allows you to test your game by clicking the “play” button at the top left (green arrow). Make sure to set the hero’s starting location by right clicking on a tile and selecting “Set Starting Position” and then “Player,” or it won’t work properly. Did you have fun entering and exiting several times? Great! Now, exit the test mode and create entrances and exits for all buildings with associated interiors (Weapon Shop, Armor Shop, Item Shop, and Inn).

A town needs villagers. These generic characters will wander around the map, dispensing wisdom to our hero. Creating villagers starts with creating a new event (see, events do pretty much everything). Thankfully, this is also easy, since these characters will not do very much. In event editing mode, simply right click on the Forest Town map, preferably on a road, and create a new event.

For the event image, choose someone from the “people” category. Then, under autonomous movement, choose “Random” from the drop down. You can change the speed if you want, but to keep things simple, leave everything else at its default setting. Finally, just like we created dialogue when Lucius read the letter, click “show text” and choose a facial image corresponding to the person you picked as the event image. Then enter a line of dialogue and click “OK”.

Using the same process, create a random female villager as well. She will urge our hero to hurry to the jail to help Grandpa York. Now, when you play test the game, walk up to a villager (using the arrow keys for direction) and hit enter. In this version of RPG Maker, you can also left click on the villager with your mouse and Lucius will walk up to them.