Playtesting

[coyotecraft]

Playtesting
In rpg maker there are some options available only during play testing that aren't available during normal play and can really help save time while you test your game and give tools to anyone testing your game who can't make official fixes to the project data.

Press and hold 'Ctrl'
Probably common knowledge - holding Ctrl to pass through tiles and objects. Say the map you are on is a maze and you just want to get to the end. You can hold Ctrl and walk thought the walls and gaps straight to the exit. It'll also turn off random encounters, but you can still interact/trigger events. It might also be useful if you or your testers discover your tileset wasn't configured properly and a flower tile, NPC, or something is blocking your path that shouldn't be.

F9-Debug screen
While on the map, if you press F9 during playtest it'll open up the debug screen. It'll list all your game's switches and variables. You can toggle the switches on/off and set the value of variables. Controlling switches is useful for turning events back on. For example, you just played through cutscene and saved but decided you wanted to change a few things. You make the changes, but your save file is past the cutscene. Do you play through the whole game up to that point? No, you can go into the debug screen and toggle the switch that turned the cutscene's event off. Then you can play through the scene again.

Conditional Branch + Debug

There might come a time when you need gold or a certain item, or under leveled. But obtaining them and leveling up is a chore. If you're like me, you'll add a temp event to the map that'll give the character what you need to advance. Of course you don't want to forget to delete the event later other wise it'll ruin the game. There's a simple way to make events play only during playtest. You just need to put the event processes in a conditional branch and for the condition use the script box on the last tab.

• In XP you use the line '$DEBUG == true'.
• In VX and VXAce you use '$TEST == true'.

This way the event will only process if the game is being play tested. You could use this with a common event that acts like a scene select so you can jump to anypoint in the game or story without closing the game, shuffle through maps, and placing a new start point.

If you don't want to give out an unencrypted version of your project data but have a debug mode available for testers you can make a special item, hidden event, or a secret condition when the character is given a certain name that turns on the debug mode, even when the game was launched from game.exe, with the the script line: $DEBUG = TRUE. Cheat codes anyone?

 

[Ellie]

Good idea for an often missed feature. Unfortunately it's too easy to screw up play testing, and battle testing especially, with scripts, so maybe we need another tutorial to say how not to mess it around. I might work that into the ezine.

Still, I don't think I've ever actually used the F9 debug screen, and it's definitely useful.