Askew - Exit 8-Style Anomaly Loops Made From Your Own Maps, Tiles and Characters, for RPG Maker MZ

Walk the corridor again. Something is wrong. Or is it?

What this is, in plain words: Askew is an RPG Maker MZ plugin (two JavaScript files, MZ 1.x) that turns any map you already made into an Exit 8-style anomaly loop. The player walks the same corridor, room or street again and again. Each pass the map is either exactly as you built it, or one thing in it has changed: walk on if nothing changed, turn back if something did. Right answers count up on a drawn pass sign; a wrong one cuts the lights and the count falls to 0. Reach the goal and an exit opens. There are 50 kinds of anomaly, and every one is made from your own map: your tiles, paintings, props, walls, floors, characters and enemy images. No art to draw and nothing to import. Commercial use in your games is included.

Set up in three steps. Put <askew> in the map's Note, paint the far end with region 61 and the way back with region 62, and (optionally) note one event <askew: sign> where the pass sign should hang. The loop starts when the player arrives.

⚠️ Compatibility — the question you actually have

Tested against RPG Maker MZ with the stock scripts unmodified, verified by running the plugin in the real engine rather than only in tests.

Plugin Manager order:

1. AskewCore.js — Askew 1/2 - the anomaly maker: reads your map, makes one change from its own tiles and characters, measures it.
2. Askew.js — Askew 2/2 - Exit 8-style anomaly loops on your own maps: walk the corridor again, spot what changed, turn back or walk on.

Core methods extended — 15 by saved-original prototype extension, none replaced: Scene_Map.prototype.createDisplayObjects, Scene_Map.prototype.create, Scene_Map.prototype.start, Scene_Map.prototype.update, Game_Player.prototype.updateNonmoving, Game_Player.prototype.canMove, Scene_Map.prototype.isMenuEnabled, Game_Event.prototype.setupPageSettings, Game_Event.prototype.updateSelfMovement, Game_Event.prototype.update, Game_CharacterBase.prototype.updateAnimation, Game_CharacterBase.prototype.moveStraight, Sprite_Character.prototype.update, Spriteset_Map.prototype.createLowerLayer, Spriteset_Map.prototype.update.

Because nothing is clobbered, Askew co-exists with other plugins that patch the same seams, including large suites.

50 anomalies, made from your map

• Objects and pictures (17): a painting swapped for its neighbour on your tileset sheet, hung crooked, mirrored, upside down, turned, recoloured, drained of colour, in shadow, in negative, bigger, smaller, slipped down the wall, painted out, gone, moved one tile, doubled, or two objects trading places.
• Floors and walls (7): a patch of another of your floors, a strip of another of your walls, a stain, footprints, a hole, a crack, a drip, each drawn in a deeper shade of the darkest colour of the tile it lands on.
• Light (5): a light out, a red cast, a flicker, the whole map darker, the whole map colder.
• Characters (15): someone who keeps facing the player, keeps their back turned, walks backwards, follows, freezes mid-step, hurries, is not there, is recoloured, taller, shorter, see-through, upside down, someone else from the same sheet, standing where nobody stood, or a second one beside the first.
• Figures (2): a black figure near the far end cut from one of your enemy images, and a copy of the player standing ahead.
• The pass sign (4): the number mirrored, one more than the real count, the arrow pointing back, or no sign at all.

Visible to a player who is looking

Before a change that redraws tiles is kept, Askew draws that part of your map as built and as changed, the way the engine draws it, and compares the two at full size. A change that moves fewer than 6% of one tile's pixels is refused and another place or kind is tried, so an anomaly is never a single invisible pixel. A change that would block the way to either exit is refused too. The same anomaly is never chosen twice in a row, and kinds the player has not caught yet come up twice as often.

Made for designers

• Per map: <askew: goal 5, chance 60, start 4 7 6, difficulty hard>. Difficulty easy keeps only the louder anomalies (33 kinds), hard leaves out the loudest (44 kinds). Leave out any kind by name.
• Commands: Start a loop here, Stop the loop, Leave the pass (for your own events), Set the next pass (none, any, or a kind by name, for a scripted tutorial), Show the anomaly (rings what changed, for a hint or a fail screen), Set the pass count.
• Variables for the count, anomalies found, mistakes and kinds seen; a switch, a common event and a transfer when the player escapes; three sign styles (enamel, brass, paper); sounds for count up, reset and exit.
• A seed for the same anomalies in the same order every time, or a new loop every play.
• Saved with the game: a save made mid-pass loads back into the same pass with the same anomaly. Your image files and map files are never changed.

Light on your game

Measured in the real MZ engine by our test harness on the gallery corridor: 11 draw calls per frame and 0 texture uploads per frame, both with a flickering light and the hint ring up and with a doubled character walking. Each pass reads your tileset once when the map loads; nothing reads pixels or allocates per frame during play.

Goes with

• Pendant: spot the difference between two copies of any picture. Askew takes the same idea onto a map the player walks.
• Rummage: hidden object scenes composed from your own art.
• Gargoyle: living statues of your own monsters that move when you look away.
• Loop Core: a time loop engine, the day resets and the player keeps what they learned.

The museum in the screenshots is built from Verdant 47, Museum, and the silhouettes are cut from Deepwarren battlers for MZ. None of that art ships with Askew: the plugin works on any map, including one built from MZ's own tiles and characters.

In the download

Two raw, readable JavaScript files (Askew.js and AskewCore.js), a full Readme and the licence. Read the full documentation before you buy: Askew Readme.

Commercial and non-commercial use in RPG Maker MZ projects. Written with AI assistance (the code, including the drawing code). © Core Systems Asset Factory.