Pennant - Capture the Flag Minigame for RPG Maker MZ: Your Party vs Any Troop, Abilities From Skills

Capture the flag, played by your own party.

What this is, in plain words: Pennant is an RPG Maker MZ plugin (three JavaScript files, MZ 1.x) that adds a real-time capture-the-flag minigame to your game. Your party plays a troop from your database, or a team of rival actors, two to four a side, on one of 5 fields the plugin draws in code. Tag raiders in your own half and they are marched into your pen; cross into their half, lift their banner and carry it home over the midline to score. Free your teammates by reaching the gate of their pen. Each player gets field abilities made from its own skills (6 kinds), and each side flies a banner struck from its leader's name. The players are your own side-view battlers and enemy images, so it works on day one with no new art. Commercial use in your games is included.

Start it in one step: an event's Plugin Command, Pennant > Start Match, with the troop or rivals, the strength, the field, the side size and the captures to win. The winner, a win switch and your captures come back into your variables.

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⚠️ 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. PennantCore.js — Pennant 1/3 - the rules: capture the flag on a field with a depth lane, tag, march, jail, jailbreak, abilities from skills, team AI. No engine code.
2. PennantDraw.js — Pennant 2/3 - the drawing: five fields, banners struck from each side's leader, the pens, ability looks, the HUD and arcade lettering. No engine code.
3. Pennant.js — Pennant 3/3 - capture the flag: your party against a troop or a rival team on a drawn field, raiding banners, tagging raiders into the pen, breaking…

This order reads sensibly in the list and nothing depends on it. Pennant.js finds the other two the first time a match starts, so any order works: the in-engine tests load Pennant.js first, and the docs test runs every Readme claim with the order reversed.

It patches no core RPG Maker method at all, so there is nothing of anyone else's for it to collide with.

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The playground rules, all of them

• Tag: in your own half you tag any raider you touch. The tagger lunges (MZ's thrust motion), TAGGED! goes up, and the raider is marched off to your pen.
• Raid and capture: reach their banner and you lift it; it streams behind you as you run. Carry it over the midline and it is a CAPTURE. Tagged on the way, you drop it and it flies home.
• Jailbreak: reach the gate of the pen holding your teammates and it swings open. Everyone inside walks home with you under a white truce flag, and nobody can tag a truce walker.
• No guarding: a side may not stand in the chalk ring around its own banner or its own pen, so a raider who reaches the ring is safe.
• The result: first to 1, 2, 3 or 5 captures, or the most at the clock, then the most prisoners held.

Six abilities, made from the skills you already have

Up to two a player, from the skills it knows, then its class's skills, then its attack skill. The element decides the look; how the skill targets decides what it does:

• Sprint (a physical skill on one enemy): run much faster for a moment.
• Freeze (magic on one enemy): root the nearest opponent in reach, who is then immune for a while.
• Shove (physical on all enemies): knock every opponent near you away and stun them.
• Smoke (magic on all enemies): a cloud where opponents stumble at about half speed.
• Ward (random enemies): a glowing ring on the ground opponents cannot enter.
• Rally (any healing or draining skill): you and your teammates near you run faster.

A computer that plays the game, not the stick

Four strengths, each with real roles: a keeper in front of the banner, guards on the line, raiders, a rescuer when a teammate is held, chasers when the banner is taken. The computer sees the field a moment late (a third of a second at Beginner, under a tenth at Hard), so a well-timed sidestep beats it. Carrying is a chase: between a quarter and two fifths of the banners lifted are run down before the line. Measured by our test harness over 120 matches per strength: a player who runs straight for the banner wins nearly nine in ten against Beginner and Easy and about two in five against Normal and Hard; standing still or mashing loses more than eight in ten at every strength.

Looks like your game, not like RPG Maker

• 5 fields drawn in code: a fair meadow with striped tents and bunting, a castle bailey, a snowfield, a beach at low tide, a torchlit clearing at night. Each has its own timber pens with gates that swing.
• Banners struck from names: 6 field colours, 2 metals, 8 charges (star, sun, crescent, tower, key, crown, cross, hart) and 4 divisions. The two sides never fly the same colour.
• An arcade HUD and lettering drawn as shapes: player cards with CAUGHT, BANNER and TRUCE stamps, each side's tally in its own banner, the clock, your ability discs filling as they recharge. No font file and no image file.

Light on your game

Measured in the real MZ engine by our test harness, four a side with every ability in play: 2 to 3 draw calls per frame and no growth in display objects over 600 frames. Nothing reads pixels or allocates per frame during a match.

Goes with

• Pelt: team dodgeball with your party on a drawn court, the same buyer's other team game.
• Bout: one-on-one duels between your own characters on a drawn stage.
• Round-up: herding minigames on your own maps.
• Schuss: a downhill run minigame.

The players in the screenshots are Wildmark battlers for MZ and Deepwarren battlers for MZ. None of that art ships with Pennant: it plays with whatever battlers your database holds, including MZ's own.

In the download

Three raw, readable JavaScript files (PennantCore.js, PennantDraw.js, Pennant.js), a full Readme and the licence. Keyboard and gamepad; touch and mouse control are not supported in this version. Read the full documentation before you buy: Pennant 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.