Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 15-9.
A screenshot of our horde of Orcs. Note how the second and fourth Orcs are nearly transparent, as
compared to their allies
The first troop event page should execute at the start of the battle. It gives the first and fifth Orcs the Immortal
state. The second page is triggered when the first Orc drops to 0% HP or less, causing the second Orc to appear and the
first one to be defeated. The last page is triggered when the fifth Orc drops to 0% HP or less, causing the fourth Orc to
appear and the fifth one to be defeated. I will let you translate this into the relevant events. Just keep in mind that your
event pages should have a span of Battle, as you don't want them to trigger more than once during the battle. Also,
keeping in mind that death is prioritized over every other battle event in RMVXA, you want the new enemy to appear
before the old one loses its immortality; otherwise, a clever player could use a skill that hits all enemies, bypassing the
reinforcements completely by defeating all of them at the same time.
Amusingly, that used to happen all the time with older RPGs, given the limitations of programming. Players
would just find sneaky ways to prevent reinforcement waves from appearing, by overtaxing the battle logic or
employing any other such shenanigans.
Ye Olde RPG—A Treatise on Quest Experience
Japanese RPGs (with most of the exceptions being relatively recent titles) tend to give the player characters most, if
not all, of their experience via combat. That was part of the reason why older Japanese RPGs were notorious for their
grinding (repeatedly fighting monsters in the same area to get gold, experience, and items) and overall difficulty. Can't
defeat any of the monsters outside of town? Don't have the gold to get items? Tough luck! Classic Western RPGs, such
as
Wasteland
and the
Ultima
series, were actually somewhat better about that. Usually. That leads to my next topic.
Think back to the Rat Tail quest we created in the port town of Seaside for our players to complete. The player
got gold out of it, but what if we wanted to offer experience as well? We could use the
Change EXP
event command to
accomplish that task. Change EXP allows you to give experience points to (or take away from) a certain party member
or the entire party (you can designate a specific actor ID using a variable as well). The value of EXP given or taken can
be a fixed value or that of a variable. Last, you can toggle the “Show Level Up Message” check box, which will prompt
the game to display the level-up box, if the experience gained from the command is enough to bump the character up
one or more levels.
