The side mission system is, tentatively, working! It's still super experimental and there's probably about a million game-breaking bugs involved in it yet, but I have a single basic test running successfully. So, assuming I don't change anything, here's how it goes:

-You find a side mission somewhere. Probably there will be a hub area for these in the sanctum, but there might be some to find elsewhere with exploring as well.

-You select a party member to do the mission. Whoever you select receives a status "on a mission" that renders them unable to act in battles. (I would have preferred to make them unselectable in the main party, but apparently that's super complicated and way beyond my programming skills for some reason.)

-After each battle, a timer ticks down, and anyone who's mission timer becomes 0 returns from the mission and the "on a mission" state is removed.

-There's a check for success, and if successful, the mission's rewards are granted.

I hope to have it where each person has different traits that make them better or worse suited for different missions, but we'll see if that's possible.

Once I get it worked out to at least a basic runnable state, I'll make a demo video so everything is clear how it works out.