[INCOMPLETE] I’m Messing With RPG Maker Again [...Not True!]

Note:
This draft has been cluttering my stupid Manage tab for like four or five months now and I’m sick of it. I just want to clear some new space for ideas for entries. And I sort of lost my train of thought, y’know like 4 months ago, so it’ll be hard to continue on to finish it. And it’s too long to just waste it, so, here it is in its incomplete, half hearted glory. Believe it or not, it’s not the first time I revisited this post. I started writing it when it was really true that I was messing with RPG Maker again. Then it was about a month that I was working with it, and didn’t have time to actually finish telling you guys that I was working on it again. So, I tried to finish this post, but so much had happened that I got bored writing and I wanted to work on other entries. 5 months later here we are. The last couple paragraphs were added about a month after I started writing about this crap.

I’m messing around with RPG Maker again. I came here with the intention of posting a sort of generic “what I’ve been up to the past couple days” type entry but I saw that I had this big draft here that detailed the specifics of what I was doing when I first started getting back into things and I’m loathe to waste my efforts. I’ll try to connect the old-news of the draft with what I’m actually doing, but if everything following this paragraph seems discombobulated and incoeherent, well, that’s probably because it is.

In a way, I kind of hoped that the RPG Maker phase of my life was over. It’s not. A month or so ago, I’ve been playing a bunch of crappy rm2k(3) games that I downloaded while I had some free time at school. For some reason playing someone else’s RPG makes me want to get back to work on making my own. I’m not entirely sure why. Most of these games suck really bad, so I don’t want to emulate them. It just doesn’t make sense, especially since I don’t really find professional games to be all that inspirational compared to the homebrew stuff. I was hoping to get a chance to review a bunch of these games, but there are so many of them, and blogging takes so much time that I’m not sure that I’ll end up doing so.

And yes, I’m back to work on my own game. I’m not being to serious about it though, mainly because in order to actually do a decent job I’m going to have to send a harddrive in for data recovery purposes to get my documents that were planning the storyline back along with some graphical resources. Since I felt that working on the more central aspects of the game would be a waste, I’ve decided to devote my energy into an important but secondary aspect… the military battle system.

War is a staple plot device in RPGs, and RPG Maker games in particular seem to use it a lot. Thing is, in most amateur-designed games, the wars are boring. Most of the time it’s just you fighting a ton of regular battles over and over again. Yawn. In Soulstorm Legacy there will be so much in the way of military combat that if I used that system I would probably bore people out of their minds. I decided that the usual style of RPG Maker warfare just wasn’t good enough. So, I brainstormed.

One of the first things I briefly considered was putting a Final Fantasy Tactics style battle system. I was a big fan of FFT, and so were my friends. I took that as a good indicator that a tactical battle system could give Soulstorm Legacy a wide appeal. Problem was that programming such a system was darn near impossible. In the pre-RMXP RPG Maker games this had only been accomplished reasonably well once in a game called Aurora Wing. And that didn’t get finished.

Wow. That’s where the draft ended. I thought it was longer. <_<. I’ll just sum up my choice of system. I decided that the wars would be handled with a battle system similar to the old 2D Legend of Zelda games, where the enemies are visible on map and you hack and slash your way through them. RPG Maker fans would think of this system as a type of ABS. The primary difference between my system and Zelda’s is that in SsL instead of controlling one character with multiple abilities and items, you have the option to swap through multiple characers who are basically one trick ponies i.e. they don’t use items and have only one set attack style. Part of that is just lazy programming on my part (making systems like that is a killer), but I think that simplicity fits what I’m going for a bit better. I’m wanting this system to be fast paced and uncomplicated.

I had started programming the system. I got so far as to allow the player 8-way movement instead of the default RPG Maker up/down/left/right movement. I had some difficulty making the actual battle part of the battle system, though. Seemed like sometimes the enemies wouldn’t get damaged when they were attacked.

After encountering that and a few other road blocks I began looking for RPG Maker related tutorials online to see if my predecessors had any advice on how to make this system. Fortunately a guy named Carius made an ABS template that showed an easy way to make a system very similar to the one I wanted using common events.

After finding that template I decided that trying to rough it and create my battle system from scratch would be a waste of time. I kind of stopped messing with it.