Suppose your story is at a point where a particular actor must be the leader. There could be any number of reasons why you’re forcing the leader to be that actor: maybe your game has a mechanic where the leader can use a specific skill on the map, and different actors have different skills available. Maybe you just want that actor to be a leader.
In any case, you want the leader to be a specific actor in the party, so you may need to perform a party formation swap. But how do you do this?
There are several ways to accomplish this.
Use a Loop[]
First, you could prevent the player from moving forward until they change the party formation, as I show in this video
But that might be annoying. Alternatively, you can use script calls.
Use a Script Call[]
Game_Party has a method called swap_order which takes two indices. When you call this method, the actors at the specified indices will be swapped.
Let’s say our party formation looks like this:
But because we are currently hunting slime, we would like Yuki the Slime Hunter Samurai to take the lead. We will need to know a few pieces of information
- What index if Yuki currently at? Basically, we want to know her position in the party
- Which index will we change it with? The leader.
The leader is easy: it’s index 0.
The less trivial part is to figure out the correct index we want to swap it with. To do this, we will use a method from Game_Actor called index, which returns the index of that actor in the party.
Assuming Yuki is actor 2, the script call looks like this:
idx1 = 0 idx2 = $game_actors[2].index $game_party.swap_order(idx1, idx2)
Once you make that script call, the party formation will change as you need.
What can you do with the swap_order script?
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