LiminAce

At least one person asked me to make a guide for this and that’s enough for me! Though, bear in mind, I may not be the best at explaining things and I used an example from assets I already had.

I made the dress-up game pictured below using RPGMaker MV, but I’m sure this method is applicable to versions above MV as well. I will be writing this post specifically through the lens of using MV (You’re also going to need some plugins, but not a lot!). At the time of typing this post, all RPGMaker engines are on sale until October 5th (just to let you know!)

(Please note: This method does not account for a game where you can freely change the colors of characters hair/clothes)

(Please note x 2: this is not a tutorial for learning RPGMaker, but a tutorial on how to make this specific type of game within the engine. Prior RPGMaker experience and familiarity is required when following this tutorial!)

I’m not the best at explaining things, but I’m sure going to try my best!

List of things we’re going to need:

-An RPGMaker Engine, preferably MV (or MZ) since they already come with mouse support.

-An art program

-A tileset consisting of words and arrows

-All your dress-up accessories as PNG images

-A blank PNG image

-2 plugins

First things first is you’re going to want to decide on the canvas size of your game. Keep in mind with the way RPGMaker works, there’s a high chance you’ll wind up with black bars on the side of your screen. If your game is intended to be played in browser on itch.io, it shouldn’t be much of an issue as you can choose the display size on the game’s page to match the visible game. (I also just personally wasn’t concerned about the black bars for a dress-up based game anyways)  The canvas I chose to work with for this game was 1152 x 864, but you can choose whatever size you feel will help you draw most effectively(just keep in mind how it might appear in browsers or if the player will have to zoom out!) If using MV, you change your canvas resolution by going into the plugin list and selecting “Community_Basic”

When making the assets in your art program, I find it easiest to have your canvas match the canvas size of the game. We’ll use Nova as our example character for everything. I drew them and all their assets in the center of the screen (for easier mirroring). The position of all the items can be adjusted later in the engine

I would start by doing a few test assets and putting those in the engine to make sure you get the hang of the whole thing, but this is where you’ll be making all your assets for a given character! (So if you wanna make some test assets and then move down to the “Putting it together in the engine” section, that might be a good idea!)

Here I create and separate every asset into their own folders(categories) and subfolders. For example, hats get their own folder labeled “hats”, and the subfolders “hat 1” “hat 2” “hat 3”, etc, each containing their own individual hat asset.

You can make as many or as little categories for clothing as you like. When you have everything you need, make at least one asset from all your categories visible, and make sure all the categories are ordered in the way they are meant to appear in game. This way, you can make sure nothing is overlapping in the incorrect way(at least for what your intentions are). When your categories are properly ordered, keep them in that order, as you’ll use it for a basis later when importing the assets into the engine. 

Alright, this next part is a little tedious. Now you’re going to save every asset individually by hiding every other folder/layer except for the one you’re saving. It might help to have a naming convention for your assets, for example all of Nova’s assets follow the scheme of “dressup nova-shoes 4.png” “dressup nova-shoes 5.png” “dressup nova-shoes 6.png” etc etc.

NOTE: In addition to these files, remember to include a BLANK png image with nothing on it! This will help later!

Once this is done, we can start importing them into the program! 

Putting it together in the engine: 

Open up your RPGMaker project’s file directory. Find the folder named “img”, and in that find the folder named “pictures”. Drop all your clothing/hair/face/etc assets into this folder.

Now we need to set the scene. The scene being…a map! I used multiple characters so my game has a different map for each one. 

Since Nova is our example character, let’s focus on Nova’s map. 

Make sure the width and height of your map is large enough to cover the whole screen (sans any black bars you might have on the sides). You can fill in the back with tiles, or you can do what I did and add a small parallax backing that loops across the screen. I made a small one with two hearts in the corners for a nice scrolling effect!

To start this map, let’s put in some of the categories to choose between. I did this by laying out the words on a tileset, and drawing that tileset onto the map. The order of categories I chose does not reflect the layer order of clothing items, but rather was organized by what I felt was a natural start-to-finish order progression in a dress-up game.

Don’t worry about putting the choice arrows next to the categories yet, though! We’ll do that in a little bit. 

Now we’re going to start with actually putting your character and their clothes/hairs/etc into the map. Double-click anywhere on the map (where you won’t put any other buttons) to create an event. 

We are going to set this event to autorun. In this event we are going to set up all your layers, even if nothing needs to be presented on them yet. To start, I added some comments to help me keep track of them.  For context, when you choose to show an image in RPGMaker, it asks you for the image number. The image number is essentially the image’s “layer”, with 1 being the bottom-most layer and 100 being the top-most layer. Up to 100 images can be displayed on an RPGMaker screen at any given time. Even though 1 is the bottom-most layer, I chose to start at 10 just in case I wanted to add more layers underneath later. So layer 10 is my bottom-most layer, and layer 24 is my top-most layer. 

Let’s start with our bottom-most layer, the background asset. 

The background is this pink rectangle behind Nova. 

Even if you change its appearance, this background itself is always visible. So we are going to show the first background on layer 10 with the Event Command “Show Picture”. 

(Note, because I wanted all the dress-up assets to be on the right side of the screen, every picture’s X position is offset by 200. You may want to offset your game in another way, or keep it centered.)

Because this is an asset that is always visible on the screen, we are also going to set up its variable. Select “Control Variables” in your event commands, set it to a constant of "1" and add it underneath the "Show Picture" command,

Don’t worry about the #number of the variable, all that matters is the number of what the variable equals. As you can see we are showing “dressup nova-BG 1”, so our variable should equal 1 to correspond to this.

The next asset up from that is our back accessory on image layer 11. (Nova can have fairy wings or a yoyo accessory, for example.) The back accessory doesn’t always need to be present, so we will simply set this image as being our BLANK png asset.

We will continue going down the column like this! Any asset that doesn’t need to be present will be set as a blank, and any asset that does need to be present (like Nova’s background, Nova’s hair in the front and back, Nova’s face, and Nova’s base) will be set as the corresponding image and have its variable set to “1”.

(Note: The base does not require a variable as it does not change)

And because this is an autorun event, we have to close it off. Add a control self-switch A, and then add a new event page. On the 2nd event page, merely click off self switch A in the conditions box

Doing this will ensure that the autorun event won’t keep trying to show the images in an endless loop.

Go into your database tab and under system, check that your starting position is on the correct map (if you have more than one) and start your game. Your autorun event should show all the images you asked it to. (I was gonna have a pic here but I'm limited on pics so)

Now, using our category list that we placed as tiles onto the map, we are going to be adding the arrows next to them to make them function.

Even though it's at the bottom, we’ll start with the category Background as an example since that was the first we implemented.

Create an event on the left side of Background and make its event image a grayed-out, left facing arrow, to communicate that the player cannot click anymore in that direction. Set its condition to be variable activated, with your Background variable being greater than or equal to 1. Leave the event page contents blank.

Create a 2nd event page on this event. On this 2nd page, replace the grayed-out arrow with a colored arrow, and set the Background variable to be greater than or equal to 2. This means that as long as the variable is 2 or above, the player can press the back button and go back to see the previous Backgrounds. 

This time, we WILL fill up the contents on the event page. 

First we are going to put a control variable command. Set your Background variable to subtract a constant of 1. This means that every time the event is clicked, it will subtract 1 from your Background variable (since this is your “Back” button).

Next, we are going to include a conditional branch command like so!

Under this Conditional Branch we put a Show Picture command, where we show an image on layer 10(the same from our autorun event). We can see that if Nova’s Background variable is equal to 1, then layer 10 is going to show the first background–that pink rectangle from before.

Let’s copy-paste this conditional branch and edit it slightly! 

Repeat this for every asset you have for a specific category. (In this case, Nova has 5 different backgrounds, with one background needing to be visible at all times.) So our 2nd event page should look like this:

This button event is now ALMOST complete–but we’re missing something! 

We need this event to activate when we click on it! Normally in an RPGMV game, when you click on an event, the player character will walk to the event before it can activate. But for a dress-up game, we want the event to activate as soon as it’s clicked on!

Therefore, we need a plugin! You’ll need a plugin that makes events activate based on a click trigger. For me, I downloaded the “TDDP_MouseSystemEx” plugin for MV found here: https://forums.rpgmakerweb.com/index.php?threads/mouse-system-ex.46511/

(Remember to follow the terms of service for whatever plugins you use!)

After adding it to my in-game plugin list and turning it on, I added the “click_activate!” notetag to the event (as instructed by the plugin) and now it works as soon as it is clicked on.

Next, we have to make the Forward Button! This is easier now that we have the Back Button as a base.

To make your Forward Button, we’re going to copy the 2nd Event Page of the Back Button event, and make it the first page of our Forward Button event. We are then going to change three things:

-Remove the condition variable

-Change the image to a right-facing colored arrow

-Change the control variable from a “subtract constant of 1” to an “add constant of 1”

So your first Forward Button event page should look like this!

For the 2nd event page of your forward button, remove all the contents in your content box. Change the arrow to gray-right-facing arrow, and add a condition variable equal to your number of assets for the category. 

Because Nova has 5 Backgrounds, our number is 5. If Nova had 7 Backgrounds, this number would be 7. If Nova had 3 Backgrounds, this number would be 3, etc.

This ensures that when a player has clicked to the last asset, they can’t continue increasing the variable past what is needed. 

You then continue making these types of Back Buttons and Forward Buttons for every asset, until you have everything you need!

But WAIT!!

For objects that don’t always need to be present, we add one extra conditional statement!

Let’s use socks, for example. Nova does not need to wear socks to complete an outfit. So for the socks’s back button, we make sure to set the variable condition to 0.

After that, under the event contents of our sock buttons, we make sure to add an extra conditional statement for the sock variable. When the variable is zero, we show the BLANK image–so there are no socks to be seen! (Remember to apply this extra statement to both the back and front buttons!) Do this for every asset that doesn’t always need to be present such as socks, dresses, hats, etc etc.

That’s pretty much the basics of all the mechanics you need to get it to work!! I won’t be going over other things like the reset game button/disabling menu access/hiding the player walksprite, as those are things you probably know how to do already if you’re familiar with the engine.

But I WILL share one last piece of optional advice that I feel makes a big difference. 

While testing things out you might notice that there is slight lag between changing images, a blip between pictures. This is because RPGMaker doesn’t preload images, and loads in an image as soon as it’s called. 

In a downloadable version of a game this slight lag is negligible. However, if you intend for your game to be browser-based, this lag will be significant and noticeable. In order to fix this problem, I’d recommend downloading Galv’s Image Cache plugin found here: https://galvs-scripts.com/2017/04/26/mv-image-cache/

This plugin will help pre-load images so there’s no lag!

However, you will have to write the name of all your assets manually in its plugin menu. If you have a lot of images (which you will, for a dress-up game) this could take a very long time. 

My advice is to go into your game’s picture folder, select all, and select “copy file path” from your folder options. Paste this list into an excel sheet, remove the directory name and file extensions, and then paste it into a google doc.

Edit the names together until there is no spaces between image names and they’re all separated by commas. Then, select all and paste your list into the Image Cache plugin’s settings. If you spelled something wrong or placed a space incorrectly, the game will not start and will tell you what image it was struggling to find. So having this to refer back to is very helpful and also means you don’t have to retype everything in the event of an error! 

(Below is just a preview of how my list of image names looks for my dress-up game and what i copy-pasted into the plugin settings for the Image Cache plugin)