RM2K Battle Events - A Small Preview

Battle events are, as you may have guessed from the name, events that occur in battles. You may have come across certain boss-battles in a game, where you think you've just about finished the boss, but it ends up healing itself, or worse, evolving into some stronger version. A common theme. And easily done in RM2K with battle events.

In this post, we'll just take a real quick look at the battle event screen and go over some of the sections. No examples this time, because we haven't reached battles in this tutorial series yet. Once we do, I'll cover battle events in more detail, with an example exercise, and link back to that from this post. But for now, good enough to just be aware of battle events.

Let's jump right in.

For once, the image is related to what I've written. Sort of.

Unreasonably Difficult Boss Appeared!

If we open up the database and go to the 'Troops'/'Monsters Party' tab, we'll see a lot of different options. The section called 'Battle Events' is what we're interested in. Let's just take a quick look at each of the sections anyway.

This is what it looks like in Don's rip

The 'Troops' tab in the latest official software

A 'troop' is made up of 1 or more monsters from your database. It's what players actually encounter in-game: a party/troop of monsters, i.e., whatever you set up on this tab. Of course, this builds on the settings of the 'Enemies/Monsters' tab which we haven't covered yet (it's here, if you're interested), so we'll leave further details out of this post for now.

1. This is where you enter some basic information about your monster party. You can either type out a custom name, or click the 'Generate Name' button and the system auto-fills the party name based on the monsters in the party. 'Battle Test' opens up a battle simulator with the selected party, and 'Change Background' lets you change the background for the test battle.
   

2. This is the area where we deal with battle event commands.
   

3. On the left here we see a pre-filled list of troops. Once you select one, you can edit the party in section number 4.
   

4. This is where you can edit the party, including specifying the list and order of monsters in the party, and what terrains this troop can be encountered on in a map (recall that each tileset can have multiple terrains in them)

In section 3, we see a 'Create New' button which creates a new event page (much like in ordinary map events) and a single 'Conditions' option. If we click on this option, we can see a list of conditions that can be used to trigger the battle event. No condition => the event doesn't get triggered.

It's a pretty large list of choices. You can probably already guess which choice might be useful to 'evolve' your boss mid-fight!

Keep in mind that the events set here will run for ALL encounters with this troop. So if you have some extra stuff in the battle events section for your Slimex2 party, this extra stuff will show up in every battle with this monster party.

The big white box is where you'll place your battle event commands. You'll see that the list of commands is a lot more limited than your map event commands list, and has a few options specific to a battle, like 'Change Enemy HP' and 'Abort Battle'.

And that's a wrap! We'll have a boss-battle at some point in this demo, and by then we should have finished all the other parts needed for dealing with battles (such as the 'Enemies' tab of the database).

Next post, we'll get right back to developing our little demo game further, now that we've covered all the crucial basics!

Cheers,

- Moosibal Meester