The Story Continues

Now we've got the crucial parts of the platform covered, let's continue building the game! This post will focus primarily on setting up the items (weapons, potions and such) that will be available in our game.

At this point, I hope you have a few other maps drawn out already; then you can use them to build out the features we will cover over the next few posts. If not, then now's a good time to set up a few. Or you can just follow along and build them with me through these tutorials.

Psych!

The Beginning

Yes, I will be prefacing most segments with my bad writing.

We'll start the game from inside Chester's house (which means setting our 'player start position' event somewhere in here), and conveniently place a plot-device right in front of the exit so that the player has no way to leave without talking to them first. Quick way to move on with the remainder of the tutorials, heh.

So the first map I'm building today is the interior of Chester's house! I've kept it small and simple, much like the protagonist himself.

Quaint

And here's how I set up the plot-device that blocks the exit. Remember, once the conversation is over, and you modify the switch/variable you're using to signal the end of the conversation, your new event page that gets triggered by this changed switch/variable has to have the priority set as 'below characters'. Otherwise, the exit will still remain blocked.

This chicken is the plot device

Don't forget to set a switch to signal the end of the conversation

Page 2 of the plot-device event

Remember the Quest Log we set up in a previous post? Notice how we need a switch to signal a turning point in the plot (that Chester must begin his search). We can use this same switch as a condition in our quest log's NPC! This way, the NPC will not show up on the log until the turning point has been reached.

The NPC

Its new settings

We can follow much the same pattern for adding any other quests or updating our main quest in the log.

Now then, it's a good idea to let your player start your game with some money and a few helpful items. But what items will your game have? And which ones are going to be helpful? That we can set up in our database!

Items Database

You can of course stick with the default database items, but if you'd like to customise it instead, then go ahead and open up the database and switch to the 'Items' tab.

As we've seen before while setting up the Dragonheart Dust event, there's already a pretty long list of items that come with the software out-of-the-box. Let's see what each of the sections are in detail now.

1. The panel on the left contains the list of items in the database. You can click on each to select them and change their configurations.
   

2. The rest of the options are all configuration settings for an item. The 'Name', 'Type', 'Cost', and 'Description' options are available for all of types of items and are pretty self-explanatory, while the rest of the options will change depending on the type of the item.

We'll take a look at each of the item types in detail so that by the end of this post, you'll be able to set up many of your own game's items with ease. Remember, this tab is where you'll be setting up every item available in game, in shops, as hidden treasures, monster drops - everything.

We can see the list of item types available to use from the 'Type' dropdown.

List of item types

Medicines

These are the items that help with healing your characters.

Lookit all of the boxes

1. The 'Consumption Limit' sets how many uses an item can have before it's completely consumed. The default 1 means that the item can be used only once. No Limit implies the item never gets fully used up. The software takes care of keeping a count of usage and decreases the item quantity in the player's list accordingly.
   

2. Scope => choose if your items heal a single member or the whole party.
   

3. Usable By => you can choose which players can use this item, i.e., which players can be healed with this item. If you deselect any character, this means they cannot be healed by this item, whether they themselves try to use the item, or someone else uses it on them. They can, however, 'use' the item on any character it is 'usable by'. Weird, I know.
   

4. Remove State => your medicinal item can additionally be geared towards healing certain kinds of states/injuries like burn, poison, or, you know, death. Hehe.
   

5. HP/MP Recovery - your medicine can either heal a fixed amount of HP/MP (such items are more useful early on in the game, where your characters anyway will have low HP and MP), or it can recover a percentage of the target member's HP/MP (very useful for use later in the game, where your characters have high HP/MP, and it would be irritating to have to heal them with items that recover 30 or 50 HP only, since you would end up using too many such items at a time).
   

6. Finally, we have a couple of additional options - 'Only usable in menu' => this item can't be used in battle; 'Only effective on dead actors' => only effective on dead actors, yep, yep.
   

Seed

Weird name, but these are items that increase or decrease your max stats - like max HP, max MP, max Agility/Speed - permanently by a certain value. Since you can decrease these values as well, this gives us scope to get really creative with what kind of items we can have in-game: want to become more powerful to be able to defeat your sworn rival in an arm-wrestling match? You can take Item X, but you'll have to forgo your naturally high agility (and are you sure want to do that? These changes can't be reversed, after all).

There's a limit though, the values can only be between -50 and 50.

Weapon

Now we get to the fun stuff!

Even more boxessssss

1. Wield Type => if 'two-handed', then the character equipping it will no longer be able to equip anything in their off-hand. Common two-handed weapons are spears/glaives, staves(or staffs?), large clubs, hammers and so on.
   

2. Animation - pick what animation you see played when you attack with this weapon!
   

3. Equipment Settings => choose which characters can equip this weapon.
   

4. Parameter Modifiers - your weapon stats. A weapon can add (or subtract) from the character's current Attack, Defense, Mind and Agility/Speed levels. The limit is between -500 and 500.
   

5. Certain other parameters can be affected too, but only on use/attack - 'MP Cost' => here you can set how many MP (if any) the character uses up on each attack; 'Accuracy' => how often the character hits the target with this weapon; 'Critical Rate' => how often the character gets in a critical hit against the enemy, thereby increasing the amount of damage they cause.
   

6. Attack Element => what element your weapon might be imbued with, i.e., if it's Fire, then enemies weak against fire take extra damage from this weapon, and so on.
   

7. State Inflict and Infliction Rate => what states/injuries (like burn, poison etc) the weapon can inflict on enemies, and how often (eg., a 100% poison infliction rate means the enemy will always get poisoned (unless they're resistant to poison)). And yes, you can totally have a weapon that kills the enemy 100% of the time (unless, again, it's an enemy that is resistant to death).
   

Shields

Shields have settings exactly as for weapons, except they represent your character's defensive strength, as opposed to offense. All the explanations given above for weapons apply here too, but as 'defense'. The only different set of options we have are shown below.

1. Prevent Critical Hits => an enemy's critical hits have no effect on your character.
   

2. Physical Evasion Up => increase the chances that your character dodges an enemy's physical attack.
   

3. Half MP cost => All spells and weapons requiring MP will have their costs halved for the character equipped with such a shield.
   

4. Negate Terrain Damage => some terrains in the default settings cause certain amounts of damage (like the purple-swamp-water-thing tiles in your default tilesets). You can create shields which, when equipped, prevent the character from taking any damage while walking on such terrains.
   

Armour

The exaaaact same as above. Everything is the same. The only difference between these two item types is that anything marked as a 'shield' can only be equipped in a character's off-hand, and anything marked as 'armour' can only be equipped in the body slot.

Head

Also the exaaaact same as above. All 'head' items can only be equipped in the head slot.

Accessory

You know it. Exaaaact same.

Normal Goods

Perfectly ordinary items. They can be used in quests, or sold at shops, but can't be equipped or consumed.

Books

These are special items that can let your character learn a specific skill.

Special

These items can be used in battle to cast a spell. Pretty self-explanatory. The battle-log message option lets you decide what message gets shown during battle when the item is used - "X item was used!" or "Y spell was cast!".

You know the one...*shudder*

Phew, that was a lot to type out (and probably take in). Now go forth, and create your own items! At this point, you have all the information you need to create Medicines , Normal Goods, Switches, Special, Book and Seed items. Weapons and stuff might need some more details, and we will go through those in the next post, but feel free to try setting those up as well.

But for now, go ahead, and set up your medicines and seeds, so that we can set up events that let Chester collect these from inside his house itself. Or you can use the default ones, whichever is easier (this is only a practice/demo game, after all). Very soon, we will be looking at setting up shops too, so a custom items database can be more fun to work with then.

Bonus: Treasure Chests

You can set up any old thing to have the items that need to be collected at the start of the game (recall the bucket with the Iron Knuckle from before), but sooner or later, you'll want treasure chests in your game (trust me, you will).

The logic for setting up a treasure chest is the exact same as the Iron Knuckle. The only addition you'll need is to change the chest graphics a little bit, and add a sound effect to make it more interactive. Here are screenshots of the settings I like to use for treasure chests (when using the default treasure chest graphics that come with the software).

Page 1 - reduce the wait command value if needed

Page 2

I could use a variable here because all newly created variables begin with a value of 0. So I know for sure that its value becomes 1 only when I set it to 1 in the previous page of this event.

With the default chest graphic, when you're setting the event graphic, you can switch between the directions to see that each direction is in fact a state in the animation of the chest opening/closing. Hence the 'Set Move Route' command in page 1.

And that's it for now! Our first scene is done. Make sure you have a couple of chests and other things your player can collect useful things from to start off the adventure with.

Next post we'll take a closer look at the 'Elements' and 'States' tabs, since they're connected to weapons and other armour. Once we cover that, we'll have everything we need to complete our item set-up in the database!

See you later,

- Meester Moosehead