MV - Fred James and the Curious Squid (interactive children's book)

I've been working on this for quite a while and sadly fell away from working on it due to issues with crippling fatigue/brain fog (which have actually only grown worse over time), but I've decided to try to push forward anyway because feeling useless is driving me insane.

Synopsis: As a shopping mall Santa, Fred James doesn't live a particularly glamorous life: A shoddy apartment, second rate food, and even an umbrella riddled with holes are all par for the course. Yet, Fred does his job with a smile, playing the part of Santa with enthusiasm, until he's confronted by a young boy calling himself "Squid", a natural skeptic, who's determined to force Fred to admit that he's a fraud.

The UI art assets aren't final, but this is all done via event scripting and some off the shelf plugins:

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Features

-Storybook that will narrate the entire story from start to finish, automatically flipping pages as it reads.

-"Memory Match" card game, which includes three game difficulty settings (6, 12, and 24 cards), and a context-sensitive hint button.

-Framerate-independent timing: the story would not be able to self-narrate without the ability to determine the passage of time outside the framerate due to the continued popularity of lower-end mobile devices (like the iPad2/3) that cannot run RMMV at 60 FPS. To this end, I created an event (a big, ugly one) that runs in parallel while the story is narrating. It checks every 5 frames to see how many milliseconds have passed and subtracts this from a "time pool" that determines how long to wait before flipping to the next page.

-Completely new menu system: made from scratch using Yanfly's picture common events.

Future Plans

-I'm working on a "puzzle pages" feature that will transform each page of the book into a puzzle of squares that will need to be unraveled through drag-and-drop. Here's an early video of what I had gotten done before being unable to work on it for several months (only the first three puzzle pieces are working, here):


-Hidden sounds: the pages of the book will feature hidden items that the reader can tap on to play various sounds.

-Missing objects: one of the game modes will present the reader with items that are missing from each page, and a tray of items that must be dragged and dropped back into place.

I kind of set out with the goal of seeing just how robust RMMV's engine is and I feel the answer is "very". I've also worked on making RMMV's map more interactable with some success: enemies you can shoot, destructible objects, etc. It's my firm belief that the eventing in RMMV makes it possible to create an entire action game out of just the map.

I recorded the narration for the book, but the story itself belongs to a friend of mine. His video for the book can be found here (as he's still looking to get the book published, if anyone is or knows a children's book publisher):

Love it. Non traditional use of RPG Maker. :D

I mostly create edutainment/game-based-training games so I also appreciate seeing non-traditional uses of the RPG Maker engines.

Interesting concept ! How do you achieve the puzzle pages drag and drop ? Event ?

Yep. Basically just events and Yanfly's picture common event plugin.

Interesting concept! I like it a lot!

Thanks!

This came on the heels of learning to do scripting in RMMV's battle system to do things like add QTEs and whatnot.

Here's a sample of some of the concepts I had brewing before I switched it up and started working on FJ instead:

This looks like a great idea. I have a baby brother he might like this.

You give me the idea to use the Yanfly's picture common event plugin for a little puzzle (set with the "hold" option) but even if my mouse is out of the picture area, the picture move, it's annoying. :mrsatan:

I like your concepts, your work is inspiring.

Thank you so much! :)

As for the drag and drop, do you have the "release" event set to drop the picture or move it back to its original location?

I hope I'm not necro-bumping. I wanted to say this is really cool. RMMV needs more unique ideas like this, especially puzze game and platformer-wise! The drag-and-drop feature could be used for level editing, or customizing title screens, or playing with the end credits.

Thanks, and the volume settings were tied into the js calls for the various volume levels.

That separate interface menu was a bear to put together, as I needed to ensure it flipped just the right switches when you went up and down levels in order to ensure exiting it resumed everything as needed.