Hi! My name is Charlotte Toumanoff, and I am a first-time game developer. This post is part of my project, “I Created A Video Game in 8 Weeks, Using RPG Maker MZ,” where I create a self-contained video game quest with impact, choices, and multiple endings, from scratch, using RPG Maker MZ.
To see the rest of the project (and play the game), click here!
Meet my protagonist. His name is Elliot (subject to change), and his class is: A Very Good Boy.
Elliot is as inquisitive and as explorative as the player decides to be--which is to say, hopefully very.
I want the world Elliot navigates through to be filled with details that build upon each other the more he interacts with them.
So, I learned how to use self-switches in order to let Elliot interact with some flirtatious potatoes (not really, but also not not really).
Let’s begin with self-switches.
Self-switches are tremendous devices that allow you to hide little easter eggs anywhere you want. I like to think of them as “Are you sure…?” devices, or “Hey, check that weird bush, again,” nibbles of joy.
They can escalate a situation, or the silliness therein.
I love having the option in games to explore the world throughout object interaction. Detail-hunting, if you will.
Undertale does an amazing job of this.
Exploring is rewarded through world-building details, triggered NPC interactions, and useful item collection. After going through a room in Undertale, most of the time you gain a sense of what that space looked like before the player got there, and what it will look like when they leave.
The world presents itself and blossoms before you in delicious little details that don’t take away from gameplay, because they’re all optional.
I want my game to have a similar behind-the-scenes world-building. A “if you want it, you can find it, but if you don’t want to, that won’t hurt your gameplay.”
Which brings us back to Elliot and the potatoes.
I love this interaction, but it felt incomplete to me.
This is what the contents of the event page looked like before adding any self-switches:
Simple.
Straight-forward.
A concept is introduced, and then gets stopped in its tracks.
Then, I learned that self-switches, in all of their glory, allow you to tell the game: “Once this happens, trigger this.”
All of a sudden, a brand-new narrative world opened up for me. I was no longer restricted to one-liners that repeated when you clicked on them again. I now had the power of escalation.
And BOY, have I enjoyed using it.
I went self-switch happy, and created a total of 5 event pages in order to create the interaction I wanted the player to have.
The end result was a hidden interaction that the player can trigger if they want to, and have the option to see it play out in its entirety, or walk away from it at any time.
