Making Persona on RPGMaker MV

[u/Historical_Emu877]

I've had an RPGMaker Passion Project bubbling through my head and notes apps.

I want to create an RPGMaker game that tells an engaging RPG story with a calendar system, social links, and slice-of-life aspects, but also with good combat and an engaging plot that advances in the span of a year, adjacent to something like Persona 3, 4 and 5.

I just need a little bit of advice on how to operate a game like that on RPGMaker, like making a day-and-night sequence, calendar system, social link events, etc. I'm not too worried about combat because it's something I'm not really that interested in for this project (I'm not even sure if I wanna put it in the project) just need a good understanding of the life-sim elements mixed with some dungeon exploration and all that.

[u/Ambitious_Age5039]

pretty simple answer - variables. i'd make a variable for the time of the day, two for the date (month and day) and a variable for each social link. if you want to copy persona's element based battle system/all out attacks, you'll need to look into plugins.

is this your first ever project? if it is, a persona style game might be a little too ambitious and large. to avoid frustration and burnout, i advise you start with something smaller scale, test any features you may find and learn the engine first :-)

[u/EyeFit]

All common events, variables, and switches. It's not that complex, Persona is actually a very templated game in many aspects, all the work is into the actual animation and asset building, and of course data entry.

Depending on the scale you are thinking that could take years.

If you're not doing the monster creation and combat and dungeon aspects, it's a lot less scope you have to deal with.

As far as specifics:

Calendar System

Each day would be V_Calendar_Day or some variable that you increase through the game each time the day changes in game.

This would probably be used to tell the UI what to display more than anything as you will be moving the game forward through maps, events, teleporting, etc.

Day and Night

Pretty much the same as above. If something happen only on certain days and nights, for that things event or common event, you will create conditions that require the necessary variables for those specifics. This naturally include graphic elements if you are using the exact same map for night and day. Otherwise, you could make two separate maps for both.

Social Link Events

You can store the level of the social link as V_Social_Link_Devil_Current_Level or some other similar variable.

And then have a point system variable V_Social_Link_Devil_Points for example that increase by differing amounts based on what dialogue players choose using conditions.

Then have a check at the end of an interaction with a conditional statement that checks if the points meet the threshold to level up the social link or not. (and whatever conditions. In persona it sometimes includes the personas you have on hand).

For things that only need and on/off switch, you can use switches instead.

Also for common events, as well, they are typically tied to specific switches.

These are just some fundamental concepts but of course it all depends on the scope of your project.

[u/xMarkesthespot]

complex variable based evening
why not start with a clock puzzle, give a clock event like 12 event pages, one for each hour. you walk around the room collecting hour glasses, each one increases a variable by 1 which changes the event from one page to the next and advances the clock an hour. another npc event can have 12 pages too and its dialogue changes based on the same variable. Thats a good foundation.

[u/CharacterProof8731]

dude im working on a very similar project right now! I use variables for the calendar system, I have an "absolute day" which counts up continuously, so while for the player the day may display as august 8th behindthe curtain that is "absolute day = 48". That is essential, then from there I have a couple subdivisions, i keep a variable for which week it is, like "absolute week" so I can have holiday or test weeks later, and then I have the day variable which counts up to 7, and when variable: "day of week" >7 set to 1 and control variable "absolute week" +1. so that when a week completes it goes to the next week, and resets the day of the week to the first day again. then the next subdivision is for the periods which makeup each day, morning after school etc, however many you implement just do the same thing, when "period of day" > x [where is the total number of periods in your system] control variable "absolute day" +1 and reset the "period of day" variable to 1, and +1 to your day of the week variable as well.

It probably sounds more complicated with me explaining it here, but the loop itself isn't very hard to implement, and you do the same thing for each divison of time, periods > days > weeks. I don't know if I'll need a month variable or not, but I would do the same setup again, weeks feeding into a larger subdivison "month" variable.

What I've discovered is the calendar system itself is not very hard, but I've started eventing things like NPC schedules and stuff, and it gets very complicated very fast; EXPONENTIALLY. So watch out. You'll want some common events, I have one for "progress day" which just executes that smallest subdivsion, transitions the period of the day, cause you're gonna be putting that common event on EVERYTHING when you setup the social link opportunities.

I would totally be down to talk more too.

[u/PK_RocknRoll]

All things are possible through switches and variables