Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
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Change Level
can be used to much the same effect. in that event command, you are declaring how many levels
you wish to add or subtract from the chosen character.
Note
Using those two event commands, you give the player even more incentive to complete sidequests and also a way
to progress in the game without having to battle monsters ceaselessly.
The Other Actor Event Commands
As it turns out, I've covered most of the event commands contained in the Actor section of the list. With that said, I
haven't covered
all
of them. Here's a bulleted list of the ones I have glossed over until now.
•
I didn't really mention
Change HP
or
Change MP
, as our only instances of out-of-combat
healing were covered neatly by
Recover All
. However, those two commands are more versatile,
as they allow you to increase
or
decrease the relevant stat. You could have a poisoned well that
injures the party when it drinks from it, or a floating fairy that recovers the entire party's MP.
The one thing to note is that you can make it so that damage inflicted with Change HP can't
knock out its victim (by not toggling the “Allow Knockout” check box).
•
Change State
: This is something that you probably won't be using constantly. Most instances
of adding or removing states from an actor are covered by skills and items on both sides of a
battle. This could be useful for a damage floor that additionally inflicts a status effect, however.
•
Change Parameters
: In addition to experience and states, you can also permanently change
an actor's stats, for better or worse.
The minimum for any stat except MP is 1. MP can be
zeroed out.
An interesting use of this event command could be for a dungeon that disallows
magic. Just make it so that the MP of every party member is set to 0 (ensuring that you write
the value of each party member's MP to a specific variable beforehand), and you're set.
It
would probably be easier to just make a Silence state and inflict it on the party when it enters the
dungeon, to be fair.
•
Change Skills
: These allow you to give or take away skills from a party member. For an actual
video game example of this happening, see Garnet from
Final Fantasy
IX. She starts the game
with a, quite frankly, ridiculous number of Eidolons (entities that can be summoned for
powerful effects). The plot takes them away from her until a time when she regains them. You
could have a similar thing happen in your game. Maybe your party's mage gets amnesia from
witnessing a horrible event and forgets how to cast everything save the simplest cantrips. Or
perhaps the game's villain seals away the knowledge of the one spell that could defeat him,
forcing the party to find a way to unseal it, so that the party's magician can learn it once again.
•
Change Equipment
: This is perhaps the Actor event command I use least. It has its situational
uses, but I'm not a huge fan. Essentially, it allows you to change an actor's current equipment.
This is good to use when a member of your party is going to leave it permanently or
semipermanently (in which case, losing the items it had equipped would be bad). Just have
Change Equipment commands remove all of its gear and you're set. Note that this doesn't
make items appear out of thin air. If you want to use this command to equip an actor with
a new weapon he/she has found, it must actually be in his/her inventory (by use of Change
Weapons), before you call for it to be equipped.
