Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 5
Your First Dungeon
In the previous chapter, we fleshed out our small game, adding many features to it to make it feel more like an actual
game and less like a disjointed mess. Our player now has an idea of what he or she should be doing. So, in this chapter,
we will be tackling the task of populating the dungeon that we created (or, rather, copy-pasted) in the previous one.
The first order of business is to determine how you want the enemies to appear.
Random or Static?
The heading poses a very important question without an easy answer.
Random
By default, RPG Maker VX Ace (RMVXA) has a random encounter system in place that allows the user to cause
enemies to attack the player after a certain average of steps (determined by Steps Average).
Static
The alternative is to do as games such as
Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest
have done. That is, place enemy troops directly
on the map. In RMVXA, you can do this much as you would any other event.
Really, it all depends on the type of game that you want. There's nothing wrong with having a game in which
every single enemy is placed on the map already (as is the case with
Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest
). In any case, even if
you use a random encounter system, you'll still want to place bosses accordingly.
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If you're using the Lite version, you won't have the event slot capacity to add all of the things listed below.
In that case, just set up random encounters as normal, to save the slots for the treasure chests and other later
dungeon content.
Note
Creating Static Encounters
For the sake of completeness, let's have both types of encounters within our dungeon. As we have not placed a static
encounter before, let's start with those. To place a static enemy, create an event, use an appropriate graphic, and find
the
Battle Processing
event command. When you click it, you'll get the menu displayed in Figure
5-1
.
