[Sidious Red]

I bought IG maker a while back and have found it very confusing, have also found the lack of comprehensive tutorials for the program (in english at any rate) a big problem. If anyone could help me out with the following issues it would be a big help

-The Menu System
I just cant work this out at all, how do you make it so a certain button brings the menu up? How does the whole items thing work? And displaying NPC text in A-RPG games? How does the Layout navigator with the nine boxes work?

Also a general tutorial on making an A-RPG would be nice

Anyway these are probably all newb questions that got you rollin your eyes at the screen so hope someone can quicly xplain these things to me

Thanks

[crayonbako]

Hi Sidious,

Don't worry, you're not alone - IG Maker is not the most user-friendly program in the world, and its logic can be baffling sometimes. It really takes a lot of getting used to (I'm there too!).

I'm currently working through some of your issues myself, so I'll help you as I figure it out.

The sample games Simple Action-RPG and Coming of Age Day do a lot of the things that you are asking about, so it might be a good idea to download the GPD files from Enterbrain. (You might need to get Coming of Age Day from the Japanese site).

As for your specific questions, I haven't got to bringing a menu up by pressing a button yet, but I will soon. Maybe someone else can answer this sooner?

Having an NPC display a dialogue box deals with making a gadget that changes switches to bring up a menu part (your text window) and display text on it.

For instance, in Coming of Age Day, the player's mother NPC has the poses Wait, Begin Dialogue (display window switch ON), Display Text (Mother's dialogue switch ON), Delete Text (Mother's dialogue switch OFF), and End Dialogue (display window switch OFF).
(She has more poses than just these, but these are the basics for NPC dialogue.)

The nine boxes in the Menus tab are for holding different parts of your onscreen menu. The centre box displays menu parts that should usually or always be on your screen during gameplay (i.e. your HUD). The other boxes are more like 'storage.' You typically can't see what's on them, but they are displayed when certain criteria are met (like a button is pressed). So, as discussed above, your speech window would be in one of these other boxes.

Check out the sample games and see how others do this, and post back here as you learn something new and/or need more help.

[Sidious Red]

thanks, that did help somewhat, am looking for coming-of-age-day right now, don't suppose anyone got a direct link to the .gpd?

its a shame that Enterbrain seem to care so little about their international users, for the price we paid there really should be more documentation on the product, but hey, i guess adversity is the mother of creation right?

[crayonbako]

Coming of Age Day is on the top of this page (second screenshot from the left):
http://tkool.jp/prod...t/download.html

Click the first link under the screenshot to download the zip file.
To open the GPD after unzipping, double-click it with IG Maker closed to open the game.
If you need any help with the Japanese, post back here.

Good luck!