Generic Boss That Transforms Mid-Battle

Eyep.

We're nearing the end of this tutorial series, which means there's going to be a boss battle at this point in the demo game.

And what sort of a boss would we be having if it didn't become stronger and mutate into a more formidable foe mid-battle, lightning flashes and quaking ground and all?

Let's set up a mid-battle-transforming boss in the simplest way I know (and it's not really the best, but it's workable. Anyone have other suggestions? Please comment on the post!).

We're going to need to deal with 2 tabs of the database to set this up – 'Enemies'/'Monsters' and 'Troops'/'Monster Party'. We're also going to need a switch.

To begin with, set up at least 2 boss enemies: one is your boss monster, the other is the monster the boss transforms into mid-fight.

I was too cowardly to make it a Boss Dragon

When you are setting your original boss' attack patterns, you'll notice the 'Transform' option. Select this option, click the drop-down and choose the evolved version of your boss as the value.

You need to do this only for the monster that will evolve.

I hear strange noises in the backyard

But the question arises, when does the boss transform? That's up to you, and usually it's when the boss' HP is at a certain level, or X number of turns have passed. You can set Monster HP levels or party health as conditions to trigger the transformation, and leave it at just that. But that's kind of ...meh. There has to be some flashy stuff to announce the transformation so the player isn't caught too off-guard on seeing the new sprite. Maybe even some dialogue.

But you might've noticed, there's nothing in this attack dialog box or the 'Enemies'/'Monsters' tab that has anything to do with such animations.

So what we can do is use the transform attack dialog itself to apply the base trigger condition (I will be triggering the transformation when boss' HP <50%), then turn on a switch to trigger the flashy animation (the switch is named 'blogBoss' in my case).

And I don't like all these weird changes on the sitebuilder

The rating can be anything because you should be having only one attack with this specific trigger condition. I'm going to keep it at 100, just 'cuz I can.

Let's move to the 'Troops'/'Monster Party' tab to set up the animations. Create a 'troop' with just your unevolved boss monster added, and move on to setting up the battle events.

Click on the conditions button in the battle events area, and choose the switch we just set up in the 'Enemies'/'Monsters' tab. Put in all your animations, and it's done! Make sure to turn the switch off at the end to ensure that the animations run only once.

Like the obnoxiously excessive padding beneath captioned images

We don't need to worry about the switch getting turned on again, because after the transformation, the game actually swaps out your boss with the evolved boss, so the monster you're fighting now is totally different, with its own attack patterns and settings (hence why we created 2 different boss monsters in at the start of this tutorial).

And the settings are done!

One final step- we need to place our boss sprite on the map, and trigger the battle using a map event.

So here's the map event I've set up. Remember, your boss shouldn't really respawn. You can check the previous post for more details on setting up non-respawning enemies.

Ded

Don't forget to set the priority to 'Below Characters'

Time to test. Hike up your character's initial level to what you think their level should be in the actual game, or be like me and push it all the way up to 50, give them the best in-game weapon available and breeze through the test battle teehee!

I may end up making separate posts on multiple ways of tackling boss transformation...once I figure them out lel

Aight,

-Mice