Making Headhunting Work, Halfway there, just need a good direction. Options

[Leoshi]

UPDATE: After a good bit of customization, a new message script has solved my dilemma. Thanks, Philip!

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So a long time ago, I thought up a side-quest system that I labeled Headhunting. Simple in essence: the player is able to do up to fifty different missions, and only five of them are required to advance the story. Doing all of them, however, gets them closer and closer to 100% completion for the game. I came up with all the mission names and details, and had started work on methods the player could use to view them and carry them out.

Well, now I'm not so satisfied with how it turned out. My first method was using the Main Menu Melody (a part of YEM) to allow a common event into the game menu, which the player could then select once the Headhunting feature was activated via switch. That worked fine, but the next part involved thirteen choice branches that returned with four mission names at a time, and the only way to advance the list was to hit cancel.

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Too long to work, I figure, so I changed up how Headhunting worked. Now I have it set to items that are given to the player, that return with the mission details for that single mission. There would be fifty of these items, allowing the player to head into their inventory and select just the details they choose, without having to trudge through the other forty-nine.

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This would do well enough on its own, so the only thing left I would need is a location the player can go in order to accept these items into their inventory. A location called the Headhunting Office came to mind, which I just recently finished decorating. It's possible for me to create various conditional branches that factor in the player's spot in the game (chapter), what missions they have now, and which ones among them they have completed. However, that seems like a lot of work just at face value.

So here I am. Does anyone have suggestions for how to change or improve the system I have now? For your consideration, it's based entirely on common events, with either a choice (method 1) or an item (method 2) being the catalyst to call these events. In a perfect world, I'd love to have a dedicated window from the menu that holds everything, including disabling missions names when they are neither available nor accepted. Something like the typical Item menu. But that's in a perfect world.

Any suggestions would be appreciated. Also, feel free to ask for any additional information you think might help.

~Leo

This post has been edited by Leoshi: Mar 2 2013, 09:00 PM

[Geekman]

A nice idea...
The methods you've thought of are basically the ones I've thought of in the past.
Here is a link to another quest log.
http://www4.plala.or.jp/findias/codecrush/...uest/index.html
It is in Japanese, but that can be fixed with Google Translate.
I didn't actually test this, and its in seven parts, but I hope it helps.