How to fade in/transition to a scene with only the lead actor visible at first?

I'm making a new game, called One Screen RPG, which as you would expect, takes place entirely on one screen.

But I'm having a problem transitioning to that screen from the intro.

When the game first fades in, it starts in this scene.





And then you end up in this room.

My problem is... how do I get it to fade in everything else from black while keeping the main character visible through the transition?

Right now, you start in a map called Intro which has the introduction dialog, and then it transitions to the main screen. But... I can't seem to figure out a way to get the desired effect, to have the rest of the map around him fade in from black.

How can I accomplish this?

I experimented with this using two methods, and I was able to accomplish this with only a half-second of the main character flickering through the transition, barely even noticeable.

It would have worked for me, but the question is, would it work for you? I accomplished this using two maps, tints and no transition fade when transferring the player.

Well yeah, I could do that, but I'd like it without the flicker.

You could try using a picture with the main character in the centre and everything else black.  Show the picture with opacity = 0, then use Move Picture to change opacity to 255 (makes screen gradually black while main character is still visible).  Transfer with no fade, then use Move Picture to change opacity to 0 again, then erase it.

Ooh, that's a good idea!

But how can I take a perfect sized screenshot of the window without the borders?

In windowed mode, use Alt+PrtScrn to get a screenshot.  Paste it into your graphics editor.  Use the Select Area tool, but set it to a fixed size, and set that fixed size to 544x416 pixels (or a different size if you're using a script that resizes the screen).  Using the tool this way will let you zoom right in and place it precisely to ensure you're removing the borders and none of the game area.  Then use the Crop tool.

I would just use that to indicate where things need to go.  Then import your main character sprite into a new layer, delete all the extra frames, keeping only the one that looks like the character on the screen, and place it over the map image right where the player is standing.  Finally add an extra layer behind the character sprite and paint it black.  Merge the lot and you should have what you're after.

This will no doubt require your character to be facing a certain direction, so if it's possible they're not, you might want to add a Set Move Route to turn in the correct direction first.

Wait... I don't understand. Why would I need to do all of that? Wouldn't just having the first step - the properly cropped screenshot, work just fine?

Oh, I thought you were following my method, which requires you to have a picture that's all black except for the character sprite in the middle.

You can't do anything different with a picture of the map than you can do with the map itself.  You have to get rid of the background and just have the character, with everything else black.  You COULD paint all the background black, but the method I described will be much faster/easier.

Doing what you said in your first post actually worked like a charm. There's a brief moment where the hero looks somewhat glowy, but it's no big deal.

Thanks :)