[Baby Bonnie Hood]

Wow, I never knew making an RPG for MZX was a major effort. Anyway, here's an RPG engine I've been working on. I hope to use it in all my future games.

oh god no i made a journal now all my future works will be unfinished

Attached File(s)

•  rpgthing.zip (4.36K)
  Number of downloads: 99

[Terryn]

Hey, uhh.

AS LONG AS YOU ONLY MAKE ONE JOURNAL INSTEAD OF SEVEN AND ACTUALLY POST MAJOR DEVELOPMENTS ABOUT YOUR DEVELOPING GAME INSTEAD OF USING THE THREAD TO POST COMPLAINTS ABOUT YOUR COMPUTER YOU SHOULD BE FINE

This looks like a simple engine, and as such I'd suggest keeping battle times and amounts smaller than otherwise. How much RPG battling do you plan to have in your game?

[Dr Lancer-X]

The timing approach you have here is fairly solid. Having multiple player characters for preferably the majority of the game would keep things at a minimum level of complexity so the battles aren't too soul destroying.

I'd also suggest you reconsider using the [ menu for selecting the kind of attack to use, partly because it changes the way you input. People will want to just hold or rapidly tap a particular key to get through trivial battles after the first few and having to switch between space and enter might be a bit of a pain (you have to press space to select a move, press enter to specify the content of that move and then space to select a target for the move.) Plus, from a UI perspective, it is a bit inconsistent.

Assuming multiple characters, a decent selection of attacks, skills, items etc. and interesting enemies that require a variety of strategies to beat, this seems like it would be sufficiently tolerable to support a game. The attacks are nice and fast which is good. You'll also want to build in some sort of experience/levelling system, even if it is a bit different from the standard, just to provide positive feedback from battling. You can make a player sit through something they wouldn't normally if they can see themselves getting rewarded for it. Preferably in a form the player sees (say, Magic Wand turns into Magic Wand II with a different effect and more damage after winning a certain number of battles etc.)

[Baby Bonnie Hood]

Yeah, but you said:

Lancer-X, on 19 July 2004 - 03:25 AM, said:

Text boxes are brilliant; they are simple to use, they have a built-in scroll system, menu selection system and pause handling. To reproduce this exact functionality would take a little work.

The [ menu is just temporary. I'll do a proper menu for the next version, as well as experience and leveling.

But now, I'm wondering about how to make another kind of engine: An encounter engine. I don't wanna do the ol' "walk back and forth until you fight something out of nowhere" bit, I want visible enemies. It sounds easy enough to do, but then what happens when more than one enemy touches you at the exact same time...?

[Dr Lancer-X]

Baby Bonnie Hood, on 07 February 2012 - 12:17 PM, said:

But now, I'm wondering about how to make another kind of engine: An encounter engine. I don't wanna do the ol' "walk back and forth until you fight something out of nowhere" bit, I want visible enemies. It sounds easy enough to do, but then what happens when more than one enemy touches you at the exact same time...?

Here's one suggestion: have it so that, if you encounter one enemy, you end up fighting that one enemy in the battle system. If you encounter two you end up fighting two etc.

One way you could do this is by having the enemy robot, on touching the player, lock the player and send a message to all the other enemy robots. They'll pause and then check playerdist and if it is below a certain threshold, charge at the player. You can then just count up the enemies as they reach the player until either no more enemies reach the player (there could be a timer) or you hit the maximum # of enemies your battle engine can handle at a time. The enemies that 'missed out' would stay around, resuming normal enemy behaviour after the battle.

[Lachesis]

SMELLS LIKE MOTHER 2

which, if anything, is a pretty good reason to give it a shot! It's a neat way of doing it and I don't think it gets used enough

[Dr Lancer-X]

I used it in end sky, not that that ever got anywhere. I also used it in my first Day of Zeux game, not that it's actually very playable (also it's extremely buggy)

[Baby Bonnie Hood]

Y'know, I don't think I've ever played a MZX RPG with visible enemy encounters. Are there any?

[Dr Lancer-X]

Baby Bonnie Hood, on 07 February 2012 - 03:08 PM, said:

Y'know, I don't think I've ever played a MZX RPG with visible enemy encounters. Are there any?

Torn Creation (team 804)

There's also some other things (like Silent Thunder's demo) but this is the best example. The enemies do not move in the field, however.

you can also watch a video for a cancelled thing that shows the enemy behaviour described earlier though I didn't use robots. You can also only see the enemies in the field as flickers, since I didn't want to maintain field sprites for every possible enemy.

[Baby Bonnie Hood]

I just did a test, and it turns out that it'll be easy to make an encounter engine after all. The "two robots touching at the exact same time" thing isn't an issue because the topleft most robot will still go first anyway.

[Baby Bonnie Hood]

I've been working some more on the engine recently. After some more work on it, I think it'll be ready to be used in a full game...

Attached File(s)

•  test.mzx (33.24K)
  Number of downloads: 46

[KKairos]

how goes the engine?

[Baby Bonnie Hood]

I'm currently making a game around it.