Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
•
In hindsight, we could have used
Change Name
instead of the script equivalent for our riddles
back in Chapter 11. Basically, you choose which actor whose name you want to change and
choose their new name. It's basically Name Input Processing, but without giving the player a
chance to decide on the new name.
Change Nickname
is the same thing, but for nicknames
instead of names.
•
Last,
Change Class
allows you to change an actor's class. It's a bit quirky, because it drops your
actor's level back to 1 (with the respective drop to parameters that this would cause) but doesn't
cause him/her to forget any skills. This could be pretty neat for a class system like that of
Dragon Warrior III
. Imagine if Eric could learn every skill available to every class in the game!
The Bridge
As an interesting hypothetical situation, say that you want to make a bridge that meets both of the following
conditions:
•
It allows the player to walk under it.
•
It allows the player to cross it.
If you were to place your bridge using map tiles, you would meet the second condition but not the first. If you
were to use events to create your bridge, you'd run into a different problem. Namely, you would have to check for two
different conditions. How do we solve this problem? We'll need the following items:
•
A Parallel Process event that checks the player's location
•
An event that has a graphic that will serve as our bridge tile
The first order of business is to figure out how the player will interact with the map containing the bridge. For
example, take a look at Figure
15-10
, to see the map I'm using for this exercise. The player's starting position is at the
top of a staircase. While the player is atop this ledge, he/she should be able to walk on the bridge tiles. While the player
is on the lower part of the area, he/she should be able to walk under the bridge. We need the bridge tile events to have
two pages. Page 1 will have no conditions and will have a Below Characters priority. The second page will require that
a certain switch be flipped on and have an Above Characters priority. The Parallel Process event will flip the switch on
when the player walks down to the ground level and turn it back off when the player ascends to the ledge.
