Help with Phoenix Wright style game

[jennypenguin]

What I'm trying to do with it right now is make it so the player can call up the item menu whenever they want. The problem I'm having is getting this to work during a conversation when a text event is present. The best I've been able to manage so far is to make the dialogues choices instead of text events and using the cancel button to call the menu, but it's not very efficient and the highlight really uglies up the box.

Other than that I think it's coming along rather nicely, but I guess this is a pretty big problem since the game's going to be so heavily text based. Any help is greatly appreciated!

 

[Grathea]

Hmm, this is interesting.
I remember that Dragonfly Studios (Heather and Makio-Kuta) released an April Fool's PW-styled game a while back. Maybe take a look at that and PM them asking really nicely for an unencrypted copy so you can study how they did it/look at their scripts?
They're currently off having a great time in Japan, so I don't know when they'll get back to you, but it can't hurt.

 

[jennypenguin]

Thanks for the help! I checked out the game you directed me to and the way they recreated the whole PW system is really impressive. If I can just get a fraction of that figured out, I think I'll be set.

It's getting closer, but now I have some slightly different problems to deal with. I tried redoing everything and setting up a couple parallel process events - one to check if the menu button is pressed and another to check if the dialogue progression button is pressed. The menu button won't bring up the menu during dialogue like I wanted, but if you hold it then press the dialogue progression button it works, so I guess it serves my purposes well enough. The dialogue button, however, is causing me trouble. I have it set up so that if the player is pressing the button it increases a variable by one. Another parallel process event has a conditional branch to check what the variable is, and brings up a dialogue box according to this number. The problem I'm running into is getting it to progress by JUST one. The increment changes depending on how long the button is pressed (and since the menu requires it to be pressed, trying to access it can mess it up, too). I tried using a similar setup with switches instead of the variable and messed around with adding a wait time, neither of which worked. Is there any way to isolate this, so that the variable only increases by one each time the button is pressed, regardless of how long it's held?

 

[Grathea]

Hmm. I'd use a combination of a switch and a variable.
On pressing, check if the switch is off. If it is, turn the switch on and add 1 to the variable. If it's already on, don't do anything. At the end of each text event, turn the switch on again.

 

[Beran]

A simple solution to your variable problem uses a script call.
Within the script call, write this

if Input.trigger?(Input::C)
  $game_variables[number] += 1
end

instead of your normal button checking conditional branch. Not that you need to replace "number" by a variable number of an ingame variable. Also, this one checks for the action button (i.e. Enter and related keys) if that's not what you wanted you can change Input::C to Input::something_else
You can find out what keys you can use in the manual

 

[jennypenguin]

Thank you gratheo and Beran! It's working great now!