Side mission preview video is up!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CymUYacUb8
Let me know your thoughts, and thanks for the support!

Ran into some technical difficulties with getting the video recorded. I expect it should be up tonight though. Thanks for your patience.

After extensive testing, and quite a bit of experimenting with javascript, I have the mission system functioning! Expect a video tutorial in the next day or two. Next release will have the first parts of the system available, assuming no game-breaking bugs appear between now and then.

After extensive tinkering, I just managed to figure out a system that will actually let me use local variables for each actor, which will make the mission system so much simpler to code. So instead of pulling shenanigans and setting aside hundreds of individual variables, I can have the missions tracked per actor. So, way easier to work with from the coding side.

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.

So I, uh, just now found out that I can set states to last for a certain number of *actions* rather than turns. Given that the battle system I'm using isn't really turn-based, that would definitely help with making them behave more consistently. So, I think I'm going to try that and see if it breaks anything.

I'm currently doing some exploratory work on a new system. As the game progresses, a reasonably diligent player is fairly likely to acquire more characters than they're able to use at one time. So, I figure it makes sense to have some way to make use of the ones that aren't being used in the active battle party. My current idea is a system where characters can be sent on missions of some sort; they'd be made unavailable for a certain number of battles, after which they'd return with small but relevant rewards, such as money or crafting materials. This is super subject to change since at the moment I'm not even completely sure that what I want to do is programmable in RPG maker, but I do intend to have some kind of system even if this one specifically doesn't work out.