Rpg Maker Developers Group

Yo! I'm working with SRPG Core in MV and I've been trying quite hard to create an engaging AOE-dodging mechanic, but unfortunately it's come to be a bit past my own skills as a programmer, so while it's a longshot I figured I'd come here for assistance. While I did place this in the Plugin Request forum, I'm a moderately skilled JS programmer so even some direction on how I could appropriate existing events and functions to make this happen would help me a lot.

So! My intention for this mechanic is for skills to "queue up" AOEs, which don't do anything on the turn they're activated but remain active and visible for the remainder of the turn, until the beginning of the user's next turn where they "go off" and trigger the effect of the skill, preferably without costing the user their action for that turn.

A mechanic like this would enable combat encounters where party members are given fair warning to dodge between enemy attacks with interesting shapes, and perhaps even enable the player to set their own traps for enemies to fall into. This type of mechanic alone hasn't been very fruitful, since I need to find a way to keep AOE tiles draw semi-perpetually as opposed to only displaying during target selection, and I also need to find a way to make the skill effect trigger before the user's movement and action phases on the next turn.

Since I wasn't able to accomplish this, I then tried making target-agnostic AOEs that trigger on fixed X/Y coordinates on the map rather than on specific targets, but that was very inconsistent in execution and enemy AI refused to use skills like that due to their AI requiring a valid target.

Lastly, I tried something similar to the above but utilizing skills with zero range and having enemies jump to the center of the map to execute the skill, but this had similar problems with enemy AI choosing not to execute attacks that have no viable target, which leads to a lack of feedback on where the enemy is attacking and whether you've successfully avoided an AOE.

So, once more I know this is a longshot, but if anyone knows a decent way I could execute an AOE-dodging mechanic utilizing the SRPG Core infrastructure, I'd greatly appreciate it!



Some additional notes about this project:
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Combat occurs on a very small 7x7 grid, which is relative to the position of on-map enemy events when you collide with them, so AOEs need to exist relative to the grid as opposed the entire map. Fortunately, I've already created a $gameMap._gridCenter array which remembers the x and y positions of the center of the grid (and by extension any other individual tile can be calculated relatively).

The following is the list of relevant plugins for the SRPG_Core systems (as well as the Galv plugins I use which interact with SRPG Core by nature of them influencing Events). Of course, I also utilize many plugins from the Yanfly Suite, most of which likely aren't relevant to these systems.
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As I mentioned before, I'm not necessarily looking for a freshly constructed plugin if there's a more efficient way this could be executed using methods I have access to. If this is a matter that would only require a few new functions I may also be able to simply program that myself, but I haven't been able to brainstorm execution of any of these mechanics myself so far. I appreciate any assistance!