Hey all. I’m still very early on in a little project I’ve been working on and had some questions about sprites and portraits.
1 - How can I make dialogue portraits adapt to “weight stages” and chosen gender?
At a glance, RPG Maker’s dialogue portraits are locked / can’t adapt to variables, but I’ve seen people make it work in other games.
Is this as simple as making new event pages for each weight stage? (Which would be a pain in the ass) Or is there a way to make the portraits adapt in the same event?
2 - How do you change the character sprites to be larger? / Adapt to weight?
Classic example is Project F.A.T.
Player gains weight → Sprites get bigger.
This might be some pretty basic stuff, but I’m not sure where to begin. Links, videos, wiki pages, and anything else are appreciated!
i suppose it depends on how intertwined you want WG to be with the story. For my game, I’m planning on having two different events for each relevant scene, 1 for not max WG size (thin) and 1 for max WG size, but I think this only works due to my game not having WG as its central focus.
I use mjshi’s battle portraits plug-in for battle which you can apply unique formula to easily adapt character portraits to different WG sizes
For dialogue, I use GALV’s message bust plug-in, but I do manually make separate events to portray the correct character size, which I can see becoming a bit annoying if you want to show a large amount of possible sizes. Hopefully, there’s an easier method, but I’ve not looked into the matter too deeply
I don’t know how to do it for dialogue portraits, but I do know a few ways on how to do it for sprites.
first would be to partition it away to only make the sprites change at a certain time. For example, if you have a “day” system, where when you play the game, the characters gain weight but it doesn’t actually show until the next in game day after you go to bed or something. In this instance it’s as a simple as a few conditional branches and “change actor image” commands in a/a few common events. This is how I’ve done it for every single project I’ve published.
Second would be a common event, parallel process. this can be pretty intensive on the engine, so I wouldn’t recommend this to be on at all times, but it is a brute force option.
third would be to do the same thing as the first suggestion, but instead of having it be based on ingame days, you just use the common event every single time you have a character gain weight from an event.
using weight level as a shorthand for conditions later on will save you a TON of time.
weight level is also good if want to have a separation between how big they are and how heavy they are for events. This is especially true if you are making a game with multiple characters with different starting weights.
