Link Here: Visustella’s plugins

Visustella is a group of developers who are recreating and improving on the Yanfly Engine Plugins for MV, creating a new collection of amazing plugins for people to use in MZ. Their plugins are separated into tiers to help keep things working properly so let’s start with a look at Tier 0: the Core Engine.

The Core Engine is where numerous minor tweaks and new quality of life adjustments to MZ reside. It includes bug fixes such as allowing party members who are set to auto-battle to use their skills as well as new features to let you bind pictures to a map’s scrolling instead of being bound to the screen. Notetags that give you the option to bypass the engine’s limits have also been added, so if you want your heroes to be able to reach level 999 now you can! There are also some battle-related plugin commands, such as one that lets you switch between the battle view. If you’re a fan of making pixel art-based games but hate when they end up blurry, turn on pixel image rendering to keep those pixels crisp and clean.

Who else is ready to fight mobs in side view battles but face the enormous final boss head-on in front view?

While we could spend the whole highlight just looking at the Core Engine, it’s time to move on to the Tier 1 plugins. Next we’ll take a peek at some that change up battles: the Battle Core, the Elements & Status Menu Core, and the Skills & States Core. Each adds an enormous amount of new features, so let’s just look at a few that I think will be really useful for taking battles to the next level. The Battle Core adds both a way to create action sequences for attacks and the ability to have animated sideview battlers as enemies, which means now you can include some incredibly dynamic moves to your battles and face an army of Reids if you so choose!

What did that tree ever do to you, Reid?!

The Elements & Status Menu Core let’s us adjust how damage is reflected, absorbed, or dealt in battles. It also allows for Traits to be set for actors and enemies, making it easier than ever to have variations in enemies without having to make five different versions per enemy in the database. The Skill & States Core works in perfect harmony with the other two battle-focused by adding in an easy way to make skills cost more than just TP or MP (who doesn’t love making a distraction skill cost money?).

Battles aren’t the only thing that Visustella’s plugins affect though, so let’s look at some that affect the menus. The Main Menu Core, Items & Equips Core, Options Core, and Save Core all add new options to the menus they’re named after. Each gives you more control over the menus, which means making the menu display the info you want the player to know should be a lot simpler. Make sure your players know which items are new and important, give them some pretty backgrounds when they save, and of course grant them even more control over the game options so that they can get the most enjoyment out of their time.

Give those sweet busts you worked on a place of honor in your menu

The last, but certainly not least, two plugins we’ll be looking at are the Events & Movement Core and Message Core. Using the two in tandem can make creating your game’s cutscenes simpler, which means you can use that saved time to make the game even more incredible! The Events & Movement Core adds in extras like 8-directional movement and more ways to activate events, so you can get even more creative with minigames and puzzles. 

The Message Core multiple options that will save you sweat and tears while making the perfect cutscene, from text codes to show a specific actor or party members face in the message box (no more having to have two different messages if your game can have a male or female protagonist!) to plugin commands to tweak the message box’s size (perfect for showing the page in a book instead of showing four messages in a row).

Guys, I’m going to cry, my signs can finally have center alignment. No more counting spaces until it looks sorta centered!

And this was just a quick look at the core plugins! Visustella is has a number of plugins out (like a TileD plugin and Dragonbones one are both live), plus many more they plan on releasing in the future, so keep an eye out on their site and youtube channel to make sure you don’t miss out on the one plugin you’ve been dreaming of!