Sandifer, or Sans has no relation to a certain skeleton. He is named Sans because he is without a body. The skeleton is named after his dialogue font, which is a SANS serif font, meaning that the font doesn’t have those little curvy flat lines on the bottoms and tops of letters. Sans might be called “sans corps”, or without body.

Anyway, Sans is part of one of the more unique elements of this game. If you encounter a shadow, a type of enemy characterized by its dark color palette, it will be impossible to defeat them.

Sans, not having a body, is carried by Newk on his wrist in the Shadowbox, which is specially designed to contain shadows. Newk can use the shadowbox to pull shadow enemies into it where Sans can do battle with them. 

This idea caused a lot of problems. How do I keep the super strong shadows from killing the party immediately before the shadowbox can be used? How do I keep an overleveled party from simply powering through shadows instead of using Sans? How do I manage the characters that are in the party on the fly? How do I stop the player from using the shadowbox on regular enemies and then STOMPING them with Sans? In another engine, and with more experience, this might be easy, but the ease of use that RPG maker is known for is gained by sacrificing versatility, which makes my ideas harder to realize if they diverge from the vanilla RPG model.

FIrst things first. I need the attacks of shadows to be different from normal enemies. My solution was to split the element system, by which some enemies can be made weak or strong to certain types of attacks, into two. There is red, then there is S-red, or Shadow-red; Green, then S-green and so forth. Shadows take 1% damage from all normal elements and attacks while player characters take 15% damage from shadow elements. That way, shadows are a threat to the player, but can’t unleash their full force on them. \

Sans uses S-elements, so normal enemies take 0% damage from Sans. This is to prevent the player from using Sans on normal enemies.

So now the player can’t get stomped by shadows, shadows can't be beat by the player,  normies can’t get stomped by Sans, and Sans CAN beat shadows. 

When shadowbox is used, the screen fades to black, the battle background is changed, sans is added to the party, all other ally characters are removed, then the screen fades in again.

Shadows lose a turn after shadowbox is executed. Then Sans and his enemies are on even footing.

Finally, what happens when the battle is over. At the end of the battle, Sans is the only character in the party. You can’t play the game with just Sans. By the way, adding the characters back at the end of the battle isn’t an easy option. I checked. 

I made a common event called getChars and placed it on every screen. When a character is added to your party I always flip a switch for that character. getChars checks for these switches every frame that you are in exploration mode and then adds all the characters that are not in the party but have flipped switches. Because of this event, the switch from battle to exploration is seamless. The characters in your party are never mixed up or lost.

Remember that I had no experience going into this problem. I tried several scripts made by other people that created a separate summonable class of characters hearkening back to Final Fantasy X.. That was a disaster. In the end, it just took some fancy eventing in vanilla RPG Maker. The only script used is to change the battleback during the use of the shadowbox. This engine is not as rigid as people think.