Resource Spotlight: Lunatechs' Plugins
hiddenone
by
hiddenone
on
January 3, 2021
January 3, 2020

Resource Spotlight: Lunatechs' Plugins

Resource Spotlight: Lunatechs' Plugins
by

hiddenone

on

January 3, 2021

This week’s Resource Spotlight is looking at a team of plugin creators who decided to work together to share their work with the community. They’ve been making plugins for both MV and MZ for us to use to improve our games, from the addition of an ‘exit game’ option to a new scene for detailed case files.

LunaTechs’ thread over on the forum is full of cool plugins and tools, so let’s take a look at some of them.

First up is Luna Item Sounds, which lets us give our items their own specific sound effect instead of playing the default SE for all of them. By adding a simple notetag to our items, we can have books play a soft creak when our players choose them in their menus and give healing apples a crisp crunch while it heals the party. We could also use SEs to separate the quality of our items if we wanted, so the common potions sound like a simple bell while the rare hyper potions play an impressive tune.

Have you ever wished for a full ‘quit game’ option in the menu? Luna Quit to Desktop gives us an easy way to add that option to our title screen and main menu. It’s a small addition but can make it a lot easier on our players, especially if our games are fullscreen.

For games that focus on reading detailed messages to solve mysteries or just want to have some in-game help files if our players need a refresher on the game’s mechanics, Luna Case Files is a valuable addition. The Case File plugin adds a brand new scene where text for items can be displayed. The text is tied to an item’s notetag, so instead of trying to fit everything we want in the item’s two-line display we can get as wordy as we want. It also works with all item types, which means we can make some hidden items with tutorial text and sneakily give them to our players so they’ll have access to help files without crowding their item menus.

LunaTechs has also shared some plugins that are still in beta but are too interesting to not talk about. Luna Minimal Map Inventory lets us use a few items right on the map instead of going through the menus. It could be a cool addition to a horror or adventure game where our players have a limited inventory or don’t have full access to the menus.

A plugin that would work well with both the Case Files and Minimal Map Inventory plugins is the Luna Hot Key Customizer. The Hot Key Customizer gives us a way to tie script calls to different keys, which means that we can call those new scenes on a map with the click of a button.

And if you’re a coder yourself, LunaTechs got some tools you might love! Lunalite contains tons of documentation to help us find the exact codes we need to get our plugins to do what we want.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg of all that LunaTechs released, so go check out their forum thread to check out everything they’ve done!

Recommended Posts