Puzzle Involving Pushing Barrels Into Water?

[Biggest_Queen 2]

Hey, so recently I started making a game and I wanted to incorporate a puzzle in which the player pushes 3 barrels across a river to make a bridge. That would allow the player to use the barrels to get across and, therefore, have access to the other side. However, I have no clue how to even start with this. I have looked up tutorials on how to do this but the only pretty helpful one that I found had imgur images and they were broken, which means I couldn't see the event pages in the first place :/

 

So, I'm sorry if it seems nooby, but I'd like to know how I could pull this off using things like switches, events and variables and preferably without a script. Any help on the topic is very much appreciated  

 

Images are helpful 

[Scrogdog 8]

Ok, so let's talk event logic.

 

 

First, the bridge. I'm imagining three separate images. The one that allows the player to begin crossing the bridge from 'this side', one in the middle which is only over water, and one on the other side. What you want to do is to create three events exactly where these images would go. The first page of the event would be blank so the image does not show yet. The second page of the event would be dependent on a switch being thrown using one of the check boxes on the left and would contain the actual image. Each part of the bridge, then, must appear using its own switch else they'll all appear at once. Let’s call them bridge 1, bridge 2 and bridge 3.

 

 

Next the three barrels. You would essentially be doing the reverse thing. Each barrel begins with the graphic enabled on the first page. When any one of them is pushed (initiate this event with player touch as the trigger and same as character as the priority) a switch called Bridge 1 is thrown. Also, this is important, turn self-switch A on. Now create a blank page two for the event which is activated by self-switch A being on. Because this is a self-switch and not a global one, only that specific barrel will disappear (since the page is blank).

 

 

Here’s the tricky part, not only do we need the first part of the bridge to appear when one of them is pushed, we also have to sort of let the other remaining barrels know that one of them has been pushed. We do that also with the Bridge 1 switch. Each barrel has two pages currently, so each should also then get a third page that is active when switch bridge 1 is on. The third page contains the barrel graphic as well.

 

 

The bridge 1 switch does two things then. It advances the remaining barrels to page 3, and turns on the bridge graphic.

 

 

Now, page three deals with turning on switch barrel two. When one of them is pushed, barrel 2 switch is thrown and so is self-switch B which shuts down that specific barrel with blank page 4 and turns on the next part of the bridge.

 

 

You would also need pages five and six for the last bridge part and to eliminate the final barrel. Use self-switch C.

 

 

I’m at work so can’t really play with it, but I think that event logic works. Let me know. If it isn’t exactly right I’ll play with it a bit when I get home. Hopefully that should get you started.

 

EDIT: Rats, I just realized that turning bridge 1 on would by pass self-switch a and turn the barrel back on. Let me think about that. Perhaps we'd need to erase that event instead. Or perhaps we add another page to the end that is blank and is dependent on both self-switch A and bridge 1 both being on.

Edited June 8, 2016 by Scrogdog

[Biggest_Queen 2]

When I push one of the barrels it would send the barrel to the bridge immediately, instead of the player pushing it over. They also don't seem to be appearing in any specific order, when I hit one of them it's just the last barrel that shows up, leaving the 2 prior water tiles empty.

[Scrogdog 8]

Well, I suppose that you could replace the blank page with an almost blank one that contains a graphic of the barrel knocked over. If you wish a delay between the knock over and the bridge part appearing, we'll use a WAIT before the switch is thrown.

 

As for barrel appearance issue, all three barrels should have the same event sequence. 

 

If page one has no conditions, and it shouldn't, that should turn switch Bridge 1 on. Bridge 1 should be the condition on the bridge event that you want to appear first.

 

Also, did you read my edit? I think what we'll have to do is to add blank pages (or a graphic with the knocked over barrel) to the end of the barrel events that test to see if both self switch A and Bridge 1 are on. We'd also need to do that with Bridge 2 and self-switch B, etc.

 

I'll see if I can put together a test event when I get home from work. Might be a hole in there somewhere.

[Biggest_Queen 2]

Okay, I'll experiment a bit with it as well.

[Scrogdog 8]

Ok, I got it working. About the only thing I forgot was to say that you should autorun your even numbered event pages. Sorry about that.

 

Don't worry if this doesn't do everything you want out of the box. Basic event logic only is tested. We can add things from here.

 

Here's the test map.

 

 

 

 

When the player touches any one of those three barrels, that barrel disappears and then five seconds later the first bridge section appears. If he then touches either of the remaining two, then that barrel disappears and five seconds later the middle piece appears, and so on.

 

I'm going to show you the first four of the six event pages that you would need to reproduce this. Because it is obvious what to do with page five and six after that.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Again, all three barrels should have the same event sequence. The bridge events have two simple pages. The first one is blank. The second one checks to see if switches bridge 1, bridge 2 or bridge 3, respectively, are on. If they are, the graphic of the bridge on page two for that particular bridge piece appears. Also, keep an eye on priorities and triggers. Odd numbered pages for the barrels are player touch and same as characters and all even ones are autorun as above.

 

There's a lot you could do with it from here. Like replace my empty graphic with a fallen barrel on pages two and four. Or perhaps, by using a move route we might float the barrel down the river until it's in position to become the bridge part.

 

Have fun!

Edited June 9, 2016 by Scrogdog

[Biggest_Queen 2]

They're still only appearing in the third position for me, did I do something wrong? Also, do you know how I could have it so that the player would have to push the barrel all the way to the opening to make the bridge?

[Chadzter01 183]

I played around with what you are after and i found some ways to make what you want but there is one small problem currently i'm having in the puzzle.

You need to put the barrels in order for it to work and if not it will restart the puzzle. I don't know if you want this but if you are

interested i'll be glad to show it to you and how to do it. =3

[Scrogdog 8]

Well. I'm old and your thumbs are hard to read. It would be better if you cropped the screenshot to a single event page and then display them individually like below. For us old folks. lol There might be something wrong in there but its a bit blurry to me. Looks ok from what I can see.

 

Check the bridge events themselves. Here's one of mine;

 

 

 

 

 

See how the event condition is Bridge 1. My middle bridge event is identical except the condition is bridge 2 on, etc. The final piece is bridge 3.

 

Yep, we can move the barrel graphics around with move route. It is best when trouble shooting to remain focused. I know its exciting to explore possibilities, but one thing at a time will serve you well when problem solving. So, let's fix the bridge parts appearing first.

 

I would also strongly recommend a video tutorial. Like you, I am here to learn, but I was traversing the sea on a boat without oars until I took one. The one I viewed, and liked, is called Tutorial Town Season 1 by Redweaver. There's quite a lot of good ones out there. Tutorial Town has you actually making a small but functional game using only default RTP resources and no scripts. You'll learn how to make a game clock, how to have visible encounters instead of random ones, how to set up quests and a simple quest log and how to do a few puzzles too.

Edited June 9, 2016 by Scrogdog

[Biggest_Queen 2]

I played around with what you are after and i found some ways to make what you want but there is one small problem currently i'm having in the puzzle.

You need to put the barrels in order for it to work and if not it will restart the puzzle. I don't know if you want this but if you are

interested i'll be glad to show it to you and how to do it. =3

Well I mean I guess that could work but the main problem with that is that the player could start pushing it the wrong barrel, and it wouldn't be a puzzle if I just told them which ones to push where.

 

Well. I'm old and your thumbs are hard to read. It would be better if you cropped the screenshot to a single event page and then display them individually like below. For us old folks. lol There might be something wrong in there but its a bit blurry to me. Looks ok from what I can see.

 

Check the bridge events themselves. Here's one of mine;

 

 

 

 

 

See how the event condition is Bridge 1. My middle bridge event is identical except the condition is bridge 2 on, etc. The final piece is bridge 3.

 

Yep, we can move the barrel graphics around with move route. It is best when trouble shooting to remain focused. I know its exciting to explore possibilities, but one thing at a time will serve you well when problem solving. So, let's fix the bridge parts appearing first.

 

I would also strongly recommend a video tutorial. Like you, I am here to learn, but I was traversing the sea on a boat without oars until I took one. The one I viewed, and liked, is called Tutorial Town Season 1 by Redweaver. There's quite a lot of good ones out there. Tutorial Town has you actually making a small but functional game using only default RTP resources and no scripts. You'll learn how to make a game clock, how to have visible encounters instead of random ones, how to set up quests and a simple quest log and how to do a few puzzles too.

Yeah sorry about that, I mainly just piled them into one/two pages because the amount of pictures would overload the image limit. I re-sized it now but I'm not sure if that helps. (I also checked the bridge events now and they coincide with what you have.)

If it helps, this is the post that I saw with the broken imgur links: http://www.rpgmakercentral.com/topic/23492-pushing-objects-into-water-to-make-bridges/

It also mentions like variables of the X and Y locations. The main problem here is that I want to push them over each other too, instead of having the "barrels" at far away locations and I can't see the events anyway.

[Chadzter01 183]

Oh now i get it. So you want the barrels to be pushed in the correct order? Hmm... I'll see if i can do it. =3

[Scrogdog 8]

Ah, yes that is going to be quite a bit more complex. Sorry I should have looked at your starting map better.

 

Ok, let's get a bit more info. First off, are you giving the player any clues on the correct order of pushing the barrels or is it trial and error? Also, what is the consequence of pushing the wrong one? 

 

So, we need to have the player push the barrel in any direction the he or she wants as long as it ends up on the correct tile, right?

 

We might be able to piece something together using that link as a guide despite the broken links. I haven't really need to track positions with coordinates yet in my projects, but what the heck? lol 

 

What would be a lot easier would be just to make sure that the player has figured out the puzzle so he knows what barrel to push and in what order. When he or she pushes it, we make a cut scene that shows him or her pushing the boulder in to the correct tile. No need to do X, Y tracking. Instead we would use move route to make the player and boulder move together along a pre-defined route.

 

If the wrong one is pushed, we just let them know it without otherwise breaking the puzzle. Like a show text that says "A magical force holds the barrel in place" or something like that.

Edited June 9, 2016 by Scrogdog

[Biggest_Queen 2]

Yeah, the player should be able to push the barrel in any direction, without any clue as to where the barrel goes. However, there is only one area that is 3 spaces wide, so when one barrel is pushed to that space, it would fill in one of those spots. Then the others fill the last 2 spaces.

[Scrogdog 8]

What do you intend to happen if the player pushes the wrong barrel?

[Biggest_Queen 2]

I don't really intend for anything to happen depending on the barrel pushed. There'll be 3 barrels and the player will just start to push the barrels in some order. If they're pushed to a specific location, which is where the 3 block wide water is, then the barrel is pushed into the water to create the bridge. I think though maybe there should be like a reset button if the player pushes a barrel into a corner.

[Scrogdog 8]

So, that's part of the puzzle then. Figuring out that the boulders can be moved and then associating that knowledge with the empty spaces.

 

Hmmm. Well, to be honest, I probably am not going to have time to work out the X, Y movement way. I'd be pretty much that same as you, but I think that the narrative in that link you made would be a good guide. I could probably work it out over time.

 

The other way to do it would be simply to do a show text on touch of the barrel that says "It appears that this barrel could be pushed", and then do a Show Choices "Would you like to push the barrel - Yes/No". If no, exit. If yes, show a cut scene that shows the player moving the boulder to the river and having the bridge piece appear. Since the cut scene would use a pre-defined route to the river for both the player and the boulder, we could dispense with the whole X, Y burden right there.

[Biggest_Queen 2]

Yeah I'm still undecided on whether I'd prefer like the X, Y movement thing or not. I think I'd prefer it because it gives the player more of a puzzle but I'm still unsure.

[Biggest_Queen 2]

Okay, I played around with it a bit once more and it seems it isn't helping and I'm not getting any different results...I still haven't tried the X, Y movement, since I don't really know how to set that up

[Scrogdog 8]

Well, if you want to go the X, Y route, I feel like that earlier post that you made would help a lot. You could probably piece it together from the description of what was done.

 

If you want to try the other method, it would seem to me to be key to figure out why I got this working but you could not, even though it seems clear that you understood the event logic of my demo.

 

Tell you what, I haven't published anything as yet because realistically my project is at least a couple/few months away from a demo release, but I'm pretty sure I still have the barrel demo. I'll try and sign up to mediafire and publish a non-encrypted demo for you to look at. We need to discover why your bridge pieces are not properly appearing. Probably need to know that no matter which overall direction that you go. My fear is that it might be something about your game that lies outside of my event logic that might be affecting things somehow. Hopefully you having direct access will help us figure it out.

 

I'll have to think a bit more on this because a precise move route would mean that we'd need to know which barrel was actually pushed. Right now the demo isn't set up that way, but we'd want to retain the idea that any barrel can be pushed to make each piece appear in order. Perhaps on push we do a conditional branch to determine that and then describe the route for that barrel.

Edited June 15, 2016 by Scrogdog

[Biggest_Queen 2]

You mean the post that talks about another topic with broken images is helpful? (With the boulders and X, Y Coordinates.)

And thank you for trying to upload it to mediafire.

Each barrel would have like its own conditional branch with its own route, or are the routes the same for each barrel and just the conditional branch may be different?

[Scrogdog 8]

Yes, it looked to me like the description of what the writer was doing was fairly complete in concept anyway. Might help to figure it out.

Yeah, I'm thinking that we might have three common events each with a move route for one of the barrels and then we just call it when the barrel is identified. Something like that. Hmmm, perhaps we could use regions to detect the proper barrel along with a small snippet of code.

@SECOND POST Posted 41 minutes later
Here's a link to the demo.

http://www.mediafire.com/download/wnml5drkw0xhub9/Test.exe

Edited June 18, 2016 by Rikifive
Merged Double Post

[Biggest_Queen 2]

Okay I had a look at the demo and I finally got them all to appear now. I didn't have a switch on one of the pages, which kind of threw off the entire thing. I've fixed it now, so now we'd just need to figure out how we could incorporate the player actually pushing it to the water. 

 

And thanks for the mediafire upload, again.

[Scrogdog 8]

You're welcome!

 

But we still have a little issue here. Did you try actually walking across the bridge? lol

 

Doesn't work as I discovered last night (I was using the same map to test the followers issue).

 

The first thing I did was to check the passability on the graphic and sure enough it was incorrectly set to X instead of O. Fixed that and then checked off the 'through' box on page two of the event.

 

Still didn't work. So I laid down a normal bridge directly without events and it worked. Hmmm.

 

I'm a bit puzzled by this. It's almost like the impassible water is overriding the through option of the event. I'll look at it again tonight as it's probably something obvious I'm missing. We'll see.

Edited June 16, 2016 by Scrogdog

[Biggest_Queen 2]

Yeah I don't know what that could be. I mean, I guess there's always a possibility that it has something to do with the fact that it's below the character/same character/above character, but even then if it's not, then it's still puzzling. 

[Scrogdog 8]

I didn't get a chance to look at the bridge again, but we can worry about that later.

 

So, let's get you started on regions and move routes!

 

First, have a look at this excellent tutorial about the many uses for regions;

 

http://forums.rpgmakerweb.com/index.php?/blogs/entry/464-player-on-region-demo/

 

Now here's the strategy as I see it. Each barrel will be surrounded by a unique region. We'll need to modify the barrel events so that instead of them disappearing as in the demo that the movement of the barrel and the player is initiated. We'll do that with a conditional branch exactly as shown in the tutorial where it looks at a small line of script to determine what region the player is standing on. That way we know exactly which barrel to move. 

 

It would be a little messy to write out all three move routes under the conditionals. I think it would be better that the 'true' condition of the branch would call a one of three common events; each one being a specific move route for one of the three barrels and the player pushing them.

 

For the most part, after you play with it a bit, I think that most of the buttons in move route should be fairly self explanatory. The thing to keep in mind here is that you want both the barrel and the player to move together, so that means that you don't want either event to 'wait for completion'. Simply stack one move route on top of the other. You'll notice that there is a drop down box in the top left of the move route screen that defaults to player. That means that the player will be affected by the move route you design. To move some other event, chose the event number from the drop down, in this case the event number of one of the barrels. You could also re-name the barrel events to, say, barrel1, barrel2 and barrel3 and then they will appear that way in the drop down.

 

So, you'll be designing two move routes for each common event; one for the barrel and one for the player. Since you don't wait for completion, they will both move together. Just keep the player in the proper pushing position if you know what I mean.

 

Again, at start consider this a learning experience so allow it to be that. Undoubtedly things will look a bit wonky at start, like if the player initiates the event from the left side of the barrel and the event has the player begin to move the barrel from the right. Don't worry about little details and perfection just yet.

 

Just get the concept working in general we'll work out the details later. Good luck!