It's been about a month since the last update. I went on vacation for a week, so if you exclude that I'm still going strong on updates every 3 weeks.

New in this Update

Bug fixes

• Fixed issue where an enemy using a skill that contains card actions would generate an error. Now it simply doesn't execute those card actions.
• Fixed an embarrassing typo that resulted in a crash if you used text codes to draw an icon onto the card text. We can all just pretend we didn't see that.

Added Plugin Compatibility

YEP_X_ExtMesPack1 and 2 are now compatible with card descriptions.

New features

This is the part to get excited about.

• You can now use Game Variables inside Card Action notetags
• New Eval Card Action lets you inject code directly into your cards

Let me explain both of these at the same time:

The biggest drawback until now for CardGameCombat was that the card-specific effects were all fixed. A card that drew 2 cards would draw 2 cards every time. But now a card's Card Actions can change based on outside influences. For instance, maybe you want a card that will draw one card for every card removed from play this battle.  That can be done like so:

<Card Actions>
Eval $gameVaraibles.setValue(4, user.removedCards)
Draw \V[4]
</Card Actions>

There are a few things to go over here. The first is the Eval action. It executes the code written in that line. The code in question here sets Game Variable 4 to the value of 'user.removedCards'. You may recognize removedCards as a variable you can use in damage formulas - well you can use it here too! The word 'user' refers to the actor playing the card.

Next we can look at the Draw action, and notice we're using '\V[4]' to indicate Game Variable 4. This is the exact same syntax you use to refer to Game Variables in RPG Maker's message boxes.

When you put these things together, you're giving a variable the amount of removed cards, then drawing that many cards.

The Eval Action is sort of cheating for me as it can help you accomplish a ton of things that could have been their own Card Action. It can facilitate a lot of workarounds for features that are still missing... though it'd definitely be better to implement them!

We have 2 more tiny features in this update:

• Added plugin parameter to turn off descriptions from cards, so the descriptions only display in the help window
• Added plugin parameter to turn the help window back on for the Skills scene.

Both of these were requests from other developers. I'm not super happy with how the Skills scene looks with the help window and actor window - at least in the default dimensions of RPG Maker - but I think it's fine for now. There's an update I have planned down the road that may have me revisit this scene.

Speaking of which...

What to look forward to:

It's time to finally work on the 2 most requested features since the release of the plugin. These features intimidate me a bit, because they do require a bit of an uprooting of the whole system I've written.  Because of this, I decided it was best to try to implement them both in the same update - better to uproot it once than break things over and over every time we want to add a new feature.

Party Battle

My co-developer Neel is calling this Type A Party Battle, as in this will be the first of several. I'm a bit afraid, personally, since I'm the one who will have to implement them; but I do see the appeal.

Let's not get ahead of ourselves: Party Battle Type A is just finally adding support for multiple party members. Each party member has their own deck, their own hand, and their own discard pile. This feature was supposed to be supported from the very beginning, but towards the release of 1.0.0 didn't make the cut - it worked mechanically, but didn't look right at all, and had a few other bugs. I wasn't happy with it so I took it off the features list.

Since then, I've re-done the Card Actions backend in a way that should make this easier to re-implement. There should be no confusion about who is drawing cards.

Turning Card Battle ON/OFF

This was heavily requested when the plugin first released, and it confused me at first because this is a plugin for card games. It didn't occur to me that it could also be for card mini-games.

Yes, this feature will let you use Plugin Commands to switch between standard battles and card battles. For those of you that want to make a regular adventurous RPG with extra card game elements that come and go.

Final Thoughts

I want to take this opportunity to appreciate everyone who has messaged and emailed MythAtelier in this past month. We've gotten a few bug reports, a few requests, and a few compliments. Everyone has been extremely polite when pointing out bugs, and overall very positive. I appreciate that you all have been very understanding of this 2-person project-in-progress. When it comes to bugs and compatibility, things are going to slip through the cracks because this plugin is huge and versatile (ideally) and we have no idea how people are going to use it. I'm still embarrassed about the typo that resulted in game crashes for some users. But everyone has been very kind and patient when pointing out these issues, and I just want to thank you all for that.

-Isiah (@IsiahGames)  
MythAtelier