Battles – Setting Up Monsters

The next few tutorials are going to be a little theory-heavy: we'll go over all the basic stuff we need to set up battle encounters in our game.

RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGHHHHHHHHH!

Let me explain why – in this demo, once Chester figures out that he needs to go to the Oceans of Paradise, he realises he needs to go thoroughly prepared. Paradise is a place crawling with monsters, and he won't survive the search expedition if he doesn't train up and/or equip himself well.

Now, equipment costs money. I've conveniently set up up only a couple of really good equipment that Chester can purchase in the game, and they are exorbitantly priced.

It's Sssskin <3

When Chester first goes to the inn we set up earlier, he learns from the bartender there that the apothecary behind the bar usually offers to buy monster ingredients at a decent price. So here we'll set up our first (unending) sidequest – a fetch quest! Sort of. Where Chester can fetch monster parts to sell to the apothecary for G to buy equipment.

Kind of long-winded, but the elements (fetch quest, grinding monsters etc.) are typical in RPGs and this pointless sidequest makes perfect tutorial fodder.

But first, we'll take a look at setting up our Monsters/Enemies in the database, and take a closer look at all of the settings we have.

Here's the list of things we'll cover over this and the next few tutorials, and in order -

1. Monsters/Enemies tab in database

2. Monster Party/Troops tab in database

3. Setting up the fetch quest at the apothecary (or whatever place you want it to be in your demo game)

4. Setting up a map with random encounters (where the monsters drop the parts you can sell)

Monsters/Enemies Tab

This section will use screenshots from the official translation of RM2K, and will jump right into explaining how we can set up monsters. If you'd like a basic introduction into the function of each panel in the tab first, including with screenshots from Don's translation of RM2K, head on over to this post about battle events.

We Meet Again Fuhehehehe

Right away we can see that the database comes pre-populated with a variety of enemies, which is excellent for our purpose. Let's take a look at one such enemy – the slime.

We see that it has 16HP, 12ATK, 4DEF etc. as its stats. And from the 'Attack Patterns' panel, we can clearly see it knows no spells – it can either execute a plain physical attack or it can run away. So this is a perfect enemy for early on in the game.

We can see below the stats how much EXP defeating the slimes gives us, as well what possible items it can drop. This latter part is what interests us.

Click the dropdown labelled 'Items' and select an item that you want the slime to drop at the end of the battle. Then select a 'drop rate', i.e., how often the item gets dropped upon defeating the monster.

Let's take a quick look at other stats for the slime. We can see options for critical hit rate – how often the slime gets a critical hit in – and 'Normal Attack Miss' – which means the slime will miss its target if it ever uses a normal attack.

Below that, we can see the state and element rates. To better understand how these work, see this post on elements and this post on states first.

If you double-click the graphic of the slime on this tab, you will see that you can actually change the colour of your enemy sprite.

imachameeeleon

This is an easy way to set up multiple classes of the same enemy with different attributes. For example, we can set up a water slime that is resistant to water damage (from both weapons and spells) but weak to earth damage, and similarly set up fire slimes, that are resistant to fire damage and so on, all by using the same base sprite.

A Hydrated Slime(TM)

A Parched Slime(TM)

The 'Attack Patterns' panel is where we can set up the enemy's attack behaviour. If you double-click on an empty row there, you'll see the box below-

1. Conditions - There are 2 options here – type and rating. Type => What pre-condition is required for this attack to be possible at all. You have 'Always' (i.e. The default condition, where the attack is always eligible for use), 'Switch' (use when a certain switch is on), 'Turn Count' (on a certain turn number), 'Group Size' (when the enemy group is a certain size), 'Monster HP/MP', 'Average Party Level' and 'Actor's Health'. Rating => the priority rating of the attack. Higher the number, higher the priority of the attack amongst a group of attacks with the same conditions.
   

2. Switch ON/OFF after action – Let's you toggle a certain switch ON or OFF after the enemy has used the attack. Not sure where this can be used – maybe to launch co-ordinated attacks from the enemies in a group? For example, Enemy A uses a DEF DOWN spell and switches on SwitchAtk, and Enemy B, whenever SwitchAtk is on, will launch a critical physical attack and then turn OFF SwitchAtk. I'm sure there are plenty of uses we can have, since switches are common to all objects in a game and are not going to be contained just within the scope of the battle.
   

3. Basic Action – A set of self-explanatory basic actions the enemy can take.
   

4. Spells – your enemy's attack can be any of the spells you've got in your database.
   

5. Transform – Where you can transform your enemy into another, more powerful version mid-battle. We'll try this out for our final boss battle in our demo game.

For my game, I've decided that there are 4 items Chester can sell to the apothecary for a really high price – spider legs, hornet wings, leafhopper grime and bugeyes. So now I'm going to go ahead and tweak the settings of some of these pre-populated monsters to a) drop these items and; b) be easy enough to defeat for a level 3 chicken (Chester's initial level). You can, of course, create new enemies entirely instead, if you want to.

The best way to see if my monsters are too strong or too weak for level 3 players is to just run a battle test using the right monster parties/troops.

Pawri

Here's what I finally set up (relevant bits highlighted):

Spider Legs

*scritch*

Hornet Wings

From, unsurprisingly, hornets

Leafhopper Grime

But that's a sli-*stab*

Bugeyes

Bugeyed Bats

Keep in mind that whatever "price" you set for items in your database, the selling price will always be half of that. So if each Bugeye costs 200G to buy, if you sell it, you only get 100G. Boo.

Now that we've got the hang of monsters, go ahead and modify the monster database to your heart's content. In the next post, we''ll look at Monster parties/troops.

-The Funkmeester