Beginners Guide to 
Written by Mike
Schmoyer
***UPDATED: March 27th, 2002***
Rpg Maker 2000 Games:
| The Tutorial Game By Mike Schmoyer (mschmoyer@hotmail.com) ***Updated November 23, 2001*** Check this out! If you want to learn how to use Rpg Maker 2000, download this great tutorial game! The characters will take you through many aspects as you play it, and when you have read all that you can look at the source code to find out how I did everything! Make sure to download this game to your Project/ folder so you can edit it in RM2K. Made in Rpg Maker 2000 | Download
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First you will need to download the software to develope and view your RPG games. Other people who want to play your games will not need to download this software becuase you are able to compile it for them. First, grab the maker files at one of the sites below.
Game File Downloads (3.42 Meg):
Next you will need the RTP file, this file holds all of the default images, sounds, music, etc. You need this because just about every game you play will have used it at some point, and you will definatly want it also.
RTP Downloads (3.42 Meg):
Finally, some people have problems with the fonts in the game, so download the font patch from the side above to fix this problem. Now you need to install the Game files FIRST, and then RTP and the Font fix. You should be all set up to create RPG's now. Dive in...
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Since you already know what RPG Maker 2000 (or commonly known as RM2K) is, we will skip that whole chapter. You will get to plunge right into the designing process. First, you need to open a new project file. If a project is already open, go up to Project, and click Close Project (you can only have 1 project open at a time). Now go back up to Project and select Create New Project... It will ask you for a Folder Name and a project name, the folder name and the project name should generally be the same. Leave the destination path alone. Now click Ok and it will create you a new RPG.
You will immidiately be taken to the main screen, and you should see a bunch of water and on the side, some landscape tiles and such.
The bottom row is self-explanitory, these are tools to lay your maps with, the square tool can drag a square of tiles, the paint bucket will fill an area with a certain tile, and so forth.
| Activity 1: Draw a City See all that water? We're going to build a city out of it! First, the tileset is defaulted to the overworld tileset, it is technically a very zoomed out view of the world, we want to be zoomed into a certain city on your world. So find the Map001 button on the lower left and right-click on it. Click on Map Properties, now where you see Name is what you can name this map, let's call it "Sample City" now go down a little and you'll see Chipsets, click on that and choose Facade out of the menu. This tileset contains all of the tiles to build a city out of. Second, you should make all of that land tiles, so go to your menu on the left and click on the grass tile. You'll want to select the Fill bucket and then click somewhere on that water. It should make the whole map become grass. Now play with your tiles, and see if you can create the house shown to the right. All the tiles generally stick to a theme of 3D like your looking down on the world, so if your houses keep with that, they will look great. Hint: The corners of the roof, windows, door and bushes are in the Object Level (look at the menu above). |
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Now that you can build maps, let's learn how to stick your characters in them. First of all you will want to place a Start Party Position where your game will begin. Click on the Event Level, or the third of the three boxes in your menu. Then find a spot on your map, and right-click. Click Set Start Party Position... wherever you want your adventure to begin. Warning! You shouldn't place your character on a wall or in water or something or he can't move. If you can't move your character make sure he is in a moveable spot.
Now let's create your characters. Click on the Options button in the menu, this is known as your Database, where most of your game information is stored. It looks overwhelming at first, but a bunch of the stuff you won't need to mess with right now. Click over to the Hero tab, and you should immidiately see a character's face and some stats about him, these are the default characters created by the Maker. Select a character under the Hero Party list to begin editing him.
First, you can change his name in the textbox, and give him a Degree (has no purpose in the game but looks). The little guy walking in the box is what this character looks like, so if you click Set... you can change his Walking Graphic, or the graphic you see in the game. If you click the set button under your character's face, you can change what your character looks like in the game menus, or when he's talking in the game.
On the right you will see Initial Equipment, this is all the goods your character starts the game with. Play with this, and you can give him some neat weapons and equipment.
The unarmed battle animation is what animation you see when your character has no weapon.
Below that, you will see the Skills box, these are all the Magic Spells and Skills your character can learn. If you double-click a blank space you can create a new skill, double-clicking a skill will allow you to edit it. The Level is the level at which your character learns this skill. The Techskill Slot Name is what you will see on your Battle Menu to bring up your skills menu, so you can call it "Magic" or "Technology" etc. The default is simply Skill.
All those graphs you see are your characters Life points, Skill points, attack, defense, and so on. You can figure out how to play with these, they can be left alone and work just fine. (Mind Force equals more powerful skills, and Agility makes your character attack faster)
Setting Your Starting Character(s): To set your starting characters, click on the System Tab, and look until you find "Init Party" You can have 4 characters in your party at any one time, so click on the boxes to bring up a menu of your characters and choose the ones you want. We will play with the rest of those buttons later.
Activity 2: Run Your Game
Now you know the basics to making your RPG, let's run the game. Make sure you have placed a Starting Location, and have at least one starting character, it being the default or your own creation. To run your game, simply Click the Run button. Now your in your game, click New Game to start a new one. You should see your map pop up and your character standing there. Use the arrow keys to move around, Return goes forward in menus and such, and escape goes back. Click Escape to bring up your menu and click End. Now you will be at your main menu, so Exit out of your game. You have just played your RPG!
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Creating Maps, Events, And Moving To Maps
Have you ever seen an RPG with only one map? Every RPG has lots of maps to move between and set your adventure's setting. To create more maps, right-click on either Map001 or your Folder in the bottom-left list, and click Create New Map..., it will then ask you for things like size, Tileset, and name. Fill these out properly, below is what all the Tilesets mean:
Now for Events, I will only go into brief detail for now, since Events are 99% of RPG Maker, and they create your whole RPG. Think of an adventure, you think of things that happen during your adventure, or Events. Events are triggered by certain tiles on your map, and can be triggered by things like your hero walking over a tile, or entering the map. Click on the Events Level (Third Box) and double-click on a tile on your map. It will bring up an event editor.
Activity 3: Make a Talking Man
Go to your house map, and find a space on your map and double-click. Looks impressive eh? It's quite simple, first, name your event "Talking Man". Now find the Graphics piece, and click the Set button, you will be able to edit what this event looks like on your map, so look for a man. Scroll down to the People1 set and click it, now click on the 3rd man in the list. You can pick which way he will face and different walking frames of him here. Click Ok.
Now find the Event Start Condition box, look through the list and make sure it's on "Push Key" this means whenever you character presses a button next-to or on-top of this event, it will trigger your events. Since we want him to talk when we click on him, we'll leave it on this. Now double-click in the white space and a large list of buttons pops up. These are all the different events you can do. For now, click on Message. In this box, type "Hello, I am the talking man" and click Ok. Now click Ok again and run your program. Walk up to your man and press Enter, he should respond with the message you typed in. Neat huh?
Now I'll teach you another event, the Teleport Event. If you have not created a 2nd map, do so now. Find a spot on your map and make a new event (double-click). Set the Event Start Contition to At Hero Touch, this makes the even run when you walk over this event. Double-click in the white space, and click on the 2 tab. The 5th button down on the first row says Teleport, so click that one. Now you will see your map in a little window, but we want to go to the other map so click on it in the list. Now find a spot for your character to teleport to. Make sure your character can go there (not on water, walls, etc) and click it in the little window, click Ok, and Ok again. Make sure you know where your transport event is, you can put it in the doorway to your house, since you can walk over that, and that is how you make characters walk into a house!
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Since every RPG has to have battles, yours needs them too. First we'll make some bad guys. If you go to your Database and click on the Monster tab, you will see many monsters already created for you, so if you don't want to make any new ones, skip down a few paragraphs to the battling part. Creating monsters is simple, just like creating characters almost, click the Set button under the picture to change what the monster looks like, you can change his stats and name also. Experience Cost and Money are how much of each of those you recieve after vanquishing the enemy. Items are an item the enemy may drop, and appearance rate is how good of a chance they will drop it (20 - 40% for things like potions is good). If you double click white space in the action pattern box, you can add some skills and things for enemy to do, and the chance that that thing will happen.
Now that your monster is all set, you need to create a monster party, a monster party is a set of monsters that you would encounter, say 2 blobs or something. In your maps, you specify certain monster parties that you might encounter in the map. So all you do is click on the Monster Party tab, and find your monster in the list and double-click, you can move him around on the screen and do a battle test if you'd like. The rest we will mess with later.
Now for battling, find a map that you want to add some random enemies to (most towns don't have enemies FYI) right-click, and choose Map Properties...Find the list that says Map Encounter Rate Editor and double-click. A list of your Monster Parties should pop up, and choose the party you want your characters to encounter randomly on this map. The encounter steps box below it specifies how many steps you might take to encounter an enemy (60 would not encounter as many, 20 would encounter more, 0 is off)
Activity 4: Create a Dungeon
Building off of what you already know, let's design a dungeon for your character to complete. Start a new map and use the Dungeon tileset, and design yourself a pretty little dungeon, use stairs, walls, water or whatever and make it look very neat. For now, this dungeon won't do anything but allow you to fight enemies, but later on you will learn how to add treasure boxes and more. So set your Map Encounter Rate and Monster Parties to some really evil dudes and make sure you set a transport from the outside to the cave, and vise versa. Now run your dungeon and see if you can battle your enemies.
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Ready for another really neat trick? First, to edit your weapons and items is the same thing, you simply specify it when you are editing your item whether it's a weapon, shield, potion, or whatever. Go to your database, and click on the Items tab. As you scroll through the list you will see many weapons, armor, shields, potions and other things. Classifications specify what the item will be, and can be selected at the top of one of your items. Each type of item has different settings, they are all self-explanitory.
Classifications:
Activity 5: Adding a Treasure Chest
Go back to your dungeon and make a neat, hidden spot for a treasure chest. You will learn how to add an item or some money to the character's inventory. Follow the instructions below to make your chest:
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Now that you can battle, and move around maps in your adventure, you need to build up the plot. If you have ever played an RPG, they always have a plot that ties the game together, and keeps you interested. Nobody is going to play your game if you just battle and walk around, they might for a few minutes but it gets old. The thing people battle for is to watch the cutscenes in your game, or movies made using your characters and maps.
The first thing you need to know is about events. Any tile can hold an event, and this event can be a person, a tree, or a door. The treasure chest you just made is an event.
Pages hold event codes, you created 2 pages in the last one. You use pages to hold certain events that will be executed at certain times or different events. The treasure chest had a second page, the stuff on this page (nothing) ran when you enabled the switch on the first page, so after you ran page 1 once (by a user clicking the chest) the switch was set and from then on, only page 2 runs, therefore nothing happens and the items won't be picked up over and over again.
Switches can hold a value of On or Off, and are used in every game you'll make. We made one for the treasure chest called Chest Opened, and when the user clicked on the chest, this switch was turned On. It will stay on for the rest of your game, if a user saves and quits, when he plays again it will still be On. Switches always start out as Off.
Now you'll want some action in your cutscene, so let's move some people around. Go back to the man you created earlier, and double-click on him. Now double-click below your Message code, and go to the 2 tab. The 4th item from the bottom on the right row is the Move Event command. When you click this, you will get a large menu of buttons and a list, this list contains all the moves your character will perform. At the top, you will see a white box, and from this box you can select who will be moving. There are two items in there by default, this Event and Hero. This event will move the current event you put this Move Event command in (the man for us), and Hero will move your hero. The buttons are all self-explanitory, so select your moves and click ok.
Activity 5: A Moving Boulders Puzzle
This activity will create a puzzle where your hero must move some boulders to get to say, a treasure chest or the level exit or something, that is up to you to decide. First, think up a design for your puzzle, where the boulders will go that the hero has to push them, and if they get the right order it will lead them to the end of it. Draw up a grid and color in the spots where your boulders will go. If a hero exits the map, the boulders will reset so be sure they can go back out and reset it if they mess up. To make your moveable boulders do this:
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Now I will show you three cool effects that modify the screen and provide cool effects for the player to watch. You will learn Panning, Color Fading, Flashing, Shaking, and battle effects. All of these effects can be performed at any time (even in a battle!) Read on...
Go to your event that will cause this cutscene (say...talking to the man) and double-click for a new code. Go to the 2 tab and the first one on the right side says Set Screen Tone. From here you can select RGB colors, how long it will take to fade, and whether or not to wait. Be warned! If you change the screen tone once, it will stay that way the entire game unless you change it back! You could make it look like night (move all the scrollbars left, leave blue slighly forward) dawn, dusk, whatever.
Next, the Flash effect, you'll find this command in the 2nd page on your events menu, it's the 2nd item on the 2nd row. Flash Screen will flash the screen, for X seconds and whatever color you pick. By checking Wait Until Done, your RPG will not continue until the flash effect is done. This is useful for emphasizing cool effects that monsters do or say an explosion or something.
Now the Shake Effect, right below flash screen you'll see Shake Screen, this effect will shake your screen like an earthquake. You can set the power, speed, and whether to wait until done here, and also the length of the shaking effect. Useful for opening garrisons or pressing switches, or when a character falls and hits the ground.
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Your hero needs weapons and items to help him defeat enemies along his journey, and thats what shops are for. If you want to think of it technically, a shop is an event that you "talk" to by pressing Enter. The command is under the 2nd Tab, called Call Shop. When you click on this command, you can pick and choose which items your shop will have.
The three commands at the top of this menu specify whether you can sell items back to the clerk, buy or sell, or buy only. The checkbox on the end is used if you successfully buy an item, and want an event to occur. Finally, you can change the words they say when you enter the shop in the middle.
The Call Inn command directly below Call Shop enables you to use an Inn. If your character uses an Inn, your whole party will be recovered of HP and MP, and all status aliements will be healed. You can choose what you want the Inn to say, and the price. The checkbox again specifies if you want an even to happen after you sleep at the Inn (like final fantasy's dream scenes when you use an Inn at certain spots).
Counters: The counter tiles are all the tiles that make up the long wooden desk otherwise known as a counter. You can talk to a storekeeper over a counter like in real life, so you don't need to worry about putting an event where the character stands or anything like that.
Activity 6: Creating a Potion Shop
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This is a very confusing process, RPG Maker 2000 requires the images to be in BMP or PNG formats, and I suggest using Paint Shop Pro or Photoshop. You can do it in paint but they don't give you as many tools to use. First, i'll give the basic philosophies.
There are three kinds of tilesets:
Each set of graphics, be it tileset, charset, or faceset has a transparent color (faceset doesn't use one). Each graphic file has a palette, or the given set of colors it will use. Since RPG Maker 2000 uses only 256 total colors, it needs to know what colors you will be using (max of 256) unlike Windows where millions of colors are already loaded into the system. The first color in your palette or the top left color is the color that will appear transparent in the game. It can be any color, but you have to make sure everything you want to be transparent is exactly the same color and uses the same spot in the palette.
In Photoshop, go to Image-->Mode-->Color Table and set the first color to your transparent color, be sure to write the Hue, Saturation, Brightness, etc of this color down so you can be sure it is used right in your picture. Make sure this first color in the palette is your transparent color, or you can use the one already there.
You can find various templates around the internet for helping you created better tilesets.
To Load custom graphics into your game, click the Import button and click the folder of the tileset type your modifying (charset,faceset,tileset) and click Import. Find your file and then click ok and it should be loaded. Make sure you name it something appropriate so you can find it in your game. You can use your set the same as any other just find it's name in the list when you need it.
Making Custom Objects for maps is easy too. You've seen the treasure boxes and rocks, wouldn't it be cool to create new treasure boxes and stuff like that? It's simple, the Object1 and Objects2 sets are actually charsets, same as people are, only they drew in the stuff instead. So to create your own objects, make them charsets and import them. Now use the skill you learned to create the old man and instead use your new picture.
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So this tutorial has not answered your questions huh? Well, there are still many places your questions can get answered. The first place to visit is the Rpg Maker FAQ by the same author. Next, if you have more advanced questions about the game, visit the RM2k Forums and ask your question there. Finally, if you cannot get your question answered, you can email us, but know this:
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