Resource Spotlight: casper667
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September 29, 2020
September 27, 2020

Resource Spotlight: casper667

Resource Spotlight: casper667
by

hiddenone

on

September 29, 2020

This week we’re taking a look at another prolific plugin maker, Casper Gaming! Casper Gaming’s MZ plugins cover a lot of different facets of development, from giving us a way to easily put our developer info onto the title screen with his CGMZ Game Info plugin to adding in brand new scenes like his CGMZ Encyclopedia and Bestiary! Casper Gaming has a bunch of plugins ready for us to use, so let’s take a closer look at some of them.


Check the thread here: Casper Gaming’s MZ plugins

First up are a couple plugins that are perfect for early game demos. His CGMZ Changelog plugin gives us an easy way to keep our players up-to-date on any changes you’ve made, so no more worrying about the players not knowing about any bugs fixes or added quests! Even if we’ve been working and updating our games, we all know how easy it is to accidentally unbalance a battle or two and cause our players to see the dreaded game over screen… Luckily CGMZ Game Over gives us the option to add in a ‘continue’ feature right on the game over screen, meaning the players can jump right back into the action. It also adds in a variable-based way to swap out the background and music, so we could share hints depending on what enemies are giving our players trouble or have some silly music play when the player finds and decides to eat the exploding cake we put in the game as a joke.

Casper Gaming’s CGMZ Menu Command Window plugin gives us a straightforward way to add in new menu options and reorganize them so they’re in just the right order for our games. It also lets us use switches to control if the commands are even shown, so if we don’t want our players getting access to something too early we can just flip a switch and they won’t even know it’s there.

As we can see from our edited menu, Casper Gaming has created three new scenes that can fit into all sorts of games. CGMZ Encyclopedia and Bestiary adds in a great way for our players to keep track of everything they find and fight in the game. And since it gives us an easy way to create custom categories, we can use it to keep track of important characters we meet or have an in-game guide so players don’t need to worry if they forget some of the controls. 

If you like rewarding your players with achievements, then go grab CGMZ Achievements! This plugin adds in a new scene to keep track of all the impressive accomplishments our players make, giving us a straightforward way to reward them based on a number of built-in requirement options from the number of battles to playtime to having certain switches active. It’s also set up to work with the Encyclopedia, so it’s simple to reward players for collecting all the items in the game.

Of course, it’s no good to give our players a bunch of achievements if they don’t know they’re getting them, which is where CGMZ Toast Manager comes into play! We get the option to use both text windows and images to create popups whenever we need them on a map. Using them for achievements is built into the Achievement plugin, but that’s not the only way to use them. With a little planning we could use them to update the player on what to do next, or just have popups for items instead of stopping the player with a message box.

Another cool plugin of his is CGMZ Infinite Colors. It may not seem too exciting at first, but it gives us a way to add new word colors into messages without having to edit the Window file! Now there’s no need to worry about accidentally changing a color on your Window file and making your ‘low health’ warning green or changing the calm color you’d picked for names into a vibrant red. Add in as many colors as you want using either rgb or hex format, and give your messages a fresh coat of paint.

And that’s just a few of Casper Gaming’s plugins! To check out all of his awesome plugins, go check him out on the forum or look for sneak peeks of upcoming plugins on his site.


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