Creating a World Map

In which I explain to you how to make a plugin-free, keyboard-controlled world map screen, except I explain it to you like you don't know what an RPG Maker is.

Making It

To get started with a world map, you'll need a player marker and a map screen, both as pictures in the pictures folder. I would recommend having your player marker as a 40x40 image, and the map as an 816x624 picture. Here are examples:



Go to your current project, or make a new one, and make a new map. Name it whatever you want, but leave at least 3 tiles in the map. If this is the map you start in, leave 4 tiles.

If you start in a world map, then go ahead and set the player spawnpoint anywhere. Next, create three parallel events.

The first one should look something like this:



What this does is show the world map. You wouldn't have a map screen without a map! The "world map" image can be swapped out for anything.

The second one should resemble this:




What this does is show a player marker. This can be a face, an arrow, or even a slice of cheese. The "right" variable will be explained soon, but it's an important one. The picture erasing commands just get rid of the old playermarker so you don't have 3 playermarkers at once.

And the third one should be structured similarly to this:




What this does is handle button presses. Whenever the designated right, left, or confirm buttons (arrows keys and Z/Space/Enter by default) are pressed, they do something in particular. The right and left buttons add and subtract to a variable which determines the cursor's position. Hitting the confirm button will prompt the player to travel. If so, it triggers a common event which I'll talk about later. The 10-frame waits you might've spotted make navigating a lot easier. Without them, it'd be harder to get to the middle spot, and practically impossible to deny traveling!

Next up is the common event, which I called "travel". For each location you can select, put in something like this:



Since "right" is where we are, this conditional branch checks to see if we're at a certain spot (in this case, the middle of the map). Every spot you can go should have a conditional branch like this dedicated to it: for instance, I have three conditional branches. When "right" is -1, I'm at the very left. When "right" is 0, I'm in the middle, and when "right" is 1, I'm at the very right of the map. Keep this in mind, since saying 0 is the middle is faster than figuring out what the middle location of 17 areas is.

In the maps, there's only one last thing to do. Erase the two pictures from the world map.




This HAS to be in the maps. I tried it with the transfer commands and it didn't work, although it did bring a result to keep in mind:
You don't have to set the "right" variable again when you exit the area. Unless something else will change the "right" variable, you don't have to change that.


I hope this guide helped any RPG Maker MV users (although it'll probably work in VX Ace too). If you have any questions, feel free to ask in the comments!