Question on making a battle system

Hey,
I'm playing around with the Editor and attacks/battle options...
I'll post my ideas, suggestion and maybe also questions for helps here.

1st idea:
Would it be possible to turn off all randomization of attacks by just choosing an option in the battle options?

At the moment this option has to be set set extra for every attack (if i'm not mistaken).

2nd idea:
Would it be possible to add the feature that one can change the 99 to another number an see how much the stats increas at this level?

So i could check how much a hero's stats are increased at a certain level.

An other thing i noticed: Also the menu was out od screen... is that okayl?

I think the easiest way to get this feature is to reserve Attack 0 as a default template. Set the bit for attack 0, and whenever you create a new attack, make it a copy of attack 0.

Unfortunately this does not help for the attacks you have already created.



Yeah, that would be a good feature. We had started on something a little like that, but it is nowhere near finished.



That is kindof a bug. The shop menu is positioned with the (bad) assumption that not all options will be enabled at the same time.

That will be fixed eventually, probably as part of this plan: http://rpg.hamsterrepublic.com/ohrrpgce/Plan_for_converting_special_screens_to_slices

Hey Bob,
thanks for your answers.
The slice thing sounds really interesting. Also, the addition of colors sounds like a cool idea.


I came up with some more thoughts, ideas and questions and feature wishes. I hope most of the latter are cause by not knowing well enougth what can or can't be done.
I admit I didn't check the wiki closely on these questions.

1) How can I make a protective attack that blocks others attacks, for example like a shield?

2) The fleeling from the „Flee instead of die“-Bitset does not exist as a default dissolve option in the battle option menu. Does the Bitset do something special additionally to ending the battle and therefor not belong in the „dissolve“ category? If so, could the Flee-instead-of-die-Dissolve be added in the Editor?

3) Would it be possible to have more transmogrification options?
Right now the attack changes every enemy it hits, right? Could one go for example only one sort of enemy beeing transfomed?
I could add elements for this result, I think.

4) We can assign elements to attacks. Would it be possible to give a hero an element? (Instead of having to write these numbers into the Elemental Resistance tables?)

5) Could there be a spawning option for attacks rather than for enemies?
It seems like I have to place invisible enemies on every map... I'd like give a hero an attack to spawn an enemy.

5.1) Is there any thing like a spawn-on-death-thing for heros?
5.2) And how can I check if a hero died during battle (so that he spawns an enemy)?
Is that even possible?

If you mean an attack that boosts defence, this is pretty easy. I have one of these in the latest revision of Wandering Hamster that does a non-blocking chain to an attack that restores defence back to normal, so it only works for a limited time.

If you mean an attack that actually animates in response to another attack, there is no way to do that... unless you only want it to work for an enemy, not a hero, and are willing to do some semi-complicated transmogrification+counterattack stuff.



Flee-instead-of-die is implemented differently than the dissolve options. It was added way back before there was any choice of dissolve options at all.

However, you make a good point. flee-instead-of-die does really logically fit with the dissolve options.




Yes, elemental counterattacks is a good way to get this effect. You could make a "transform" elemental, and give it to an attack that can cause the target to transmogrify. Each enemy can have its own transform counterattack that transmogrifies it into an appropriate form.



I am not sure what you mean by this question. Can you clarify?



To allow the hero to spawn an enemy, you would still need an invisible enemy in each formation to define the placement of the enemy.

More than 8 enemies in a formation is certainly a possibility for the future.



No, but I do hope to eventually add a way to make heroes do on-death-bequest attacks, which could get you the same results.




Hmm... right now, I can't think of any good way to do that. Maybe you could work something out with a tag check and an invisible enemy. For example, when the hero dies a tag can change to indicate that they are not alive anymore (I haven't checked, but I think those tags update mid-battle) You could have an invisible enemy that does an attack which only chains if the tag check passes.

However, I think that would require one invisible enemy for every hero, so it probably isn't practical.

Thanks for your answers.


I was thinking of an attack to block attaks that usually would hit.

I'm not sure what you mean by „non-blocking chain“ as well.




Something like this, so an element can be assigned more easily to a hero or enemie.
At the moment the element is not assigned ditectly but, by entering lots of elemental resitances, both for Heros and Enemies.
There would be need of a menu where to assign how the elements relate to eachother.
I thought this would make setting uo heros and enemies easier, but maybe just for me, because I'm easily confusing numbers.



Oh Yeahy! I'm looking forward to this.


I'll test it's working with the tags and one day, of there is no way to get this to work, i'll wait for the the on-death-bequest attack for heros, or add a second battle after the frist one only to be triggered if the hero died during battle, or something like that.

In regards to the "character element" idea, this sounds to me like marionline is asking for the ability to define 'presets' for the elemental damage screen. Like, wouldn't it be cool if we could have a menu where we name and define "fire-based character" to mean absorb fire, take 150% from water, and maybe others.

Then on a given enemy or hero bitset page, there would be an option to 'apply a preset'. Doing so would set all the numbers to match the user-defined preset. From there the user could continue to tweak the numbers if desired.

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@msw188: That's exactly what I meant (but faild to express.)

Regarding what was said earlier about supporting 8 or more enemies in the future, I also think it would be cool to have a bitset which makes the enemies join in to formation once an "on screen enemy" is killed. Kind of like in earthbound when you fight a hoard of enemies, you can only see 3 or 4 but once you kill one you are surprised to see that another one slides in to take its place. I know this can be faked with spawning an enemy of the same kind but it would be nice to have as a bitset for ease of use, and to avoid endless hoards.

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It's me again.
I tried the tag thing (see below), and found some things that puzzled me a bit.



If F4 is pressed during battle the battle ends. xD
Also the thing where one can check wich tags are set off/on (that shows up when pressing F4 outside of battles) can not be seen during battle...

Also the "Tag-Strategy" mentioned above does not seem to work.
I set up an attack-chain that should only be working if Hero-is-alife-tag is off, but it never is triggered, it seems.
After a battle, when the hero got killed, that is-alive-tag still was not turned off.
I guess, that might be a bug? (or I've used the is-alive-tag wrong).

F4 is battle is instant-run, and it is only available if debug keys are enabled.

I guess it would be nice to change that to something harder to press by accident.

Allow the tag-viewing screen in battle would be a good idea.



It might be a bug. Maybe it is failing to update the hero death tags until the battle ends. That sounds like a bug.

Someone has already convinced me previously that this is needed. There are two ways to set up elemental damages. Either you can do what we have, setting elemental bits on the attacks and the amount of bonus damage taken from each element on the enemies and heroes, or you might want to do it the opposite way: set elemental bits on the enemies and heroes, and set the damage done against each character/enemy elemental type on the attacks. The later can be emulated by presets with the effect of making a character water-type or whatever (eg absorb water, weak to lightning, etc). Crucially, it should be possible to combine presets, so that a character can be both water and wind type, for example.
You might notice that character bits are actually nearly the same as the old enemy type bits, which I foolishly converted into elements in order to unify things. I suppose that if we had a screen showing what presets had been applied, and the ability to toggle them, then that would be as good or better than being able to apply elemental bits to characters directly.



It is a bug; it's already on bugzilla: http://rpg.hamsterrepublic.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=998

Speaking of complicated transmogrification+counterattack stuff, I still think we need a slightly more versatile transmogrification system than we currently have. The current method is perfect for toad and imp style spell attacks, but terrible for invisibility and limited for actual enemy-specific transformations.

At some point, there should be a special definition for enemies (not attacks) that allow them to transform to a specific type when hit by certain elements. For example, small ogre, when hit with adrenaline juice, becomes big ogre. As of the current system, hitting small ogre with adrenaline juice can do this. Unfortunately, hitting green slime with adrenaline juice will also turn it into big ogre. There's a problem there.

When enemies attack themselves with specific attacks (like adrenaline juice is something that only small ogre can use, and it's designed to attack itself), then we have no issue. All is well in the world. But what if I want my game-hunting hero to hit the enemy with adrenaline juice (small ogre, green slime, etc.) so that it can kill a bigger and more rewarding enemy (big ogre, spiky slime, Pokemon, etc.), thus taking home a bigger prize? Suddenly, limiting transmogrification to attacks only doesn't seem so awesome.

Could we add transmogrify to the enemy register? Maybe each enemy could have 8-24 possible reactions, depending on what element hits it. This would make enemy invisibility (that the hero has to reveal in order to hit it) much simpler to handle. As of now, the best thing we have to simulate this is enemy spawning, and that's positionally unreliable. Enemies that are supposed to become something else, not necessarily spawn something else, need to keep the same exact position, and enemy spawning doesn't always work here.

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Actually, this feature already exists.

Just do the transmogrification with self-targeting elemental counterattacks.

For example, make an "Adrenaline" elemental.

Make a self-targetting attack that transmogrifies the target into "Big Ogre".

Then assign that attack to the "Small Ogre" enemy as a counterattack to the Adrenaline elemental.

Ah, okay. I see now. I made some changes to one of my enemies. Hopefully that will fix things, as well as making my "revealer" item far more interesting in the future.

Man, I am never gonna understand how battles work completely. My weakness.

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Not just you, they *are* really complicated :)