Evented Encounter System Part II

Look at my hard work and PRAISE ME.

Surprise attack is SURPRISING.

Evented Random Encounter System

I've been working on this stupid Evented random encounter system for the last couple of weeks and I've FINALLY gotten it to work. You know when you've been trying to do something for ages and it doesn't work and you can't understand why, and then you crack it and you feel like you could craft a full-blown whale out of potato skins? Yeah.

But yeah, friggin' stoked that I got this stupid thing working. To explain a bit about the system: I played a game made in RPG Maker XP a few years back called Exit Fate (I think?), and it was kind of like a Suikoden-rip (hence why I liked it, because Suikoden is boss), and it had this nifty wee system where it would alert you by making a sound and showing a picture in the top corner whenever a random encounter was about to initiate, and you could press a button and let go of some gold in order to avoid the fight. It always stuck in my mind, because I'm personally not a fan of on-screen encounters most of the time, to be honest. Pretty sure everyone else loves them, but hey.

One of the major complaints about random encounters (i.e. where the enemy is invisible and the encounter is calculated by the (random) amount of steps you take) is that there's generally no way to avoid them, they can be immersion-breaking if you're in the middle of something, like a puzzle, and just generally annoying. I thought this was a great way to keep them in the game and hopefully lessen some of those issues. Also, RPG Maker has a weird way of calculating the random encounters, so you could be getting into a battle every couple of steps if you weren't careful.

I looked up an 'encounter alert' script of some kind that I could use, and I found one for RPG Maker VX Ace, which is a newer system than what I'm using (RPG Maker VX), so the script was incompatible. So I tried to find tutorials on how to make one using Events, but couldn't find anything (generally because no one likes random encounters, I presume). And then finally I found a tutorial written for one of the earlier RPG Makers (with no scripting capacity), which detailed how to make your own random encounter system using Events, so I based my system off that tutorial and then added my own changes in order to make the 'alerts' work.

Don't know if any of that makes sense to any of you, and I'm sorry that this isn't an update with pretty pictures, but hopefully I'll get another update out soon with all of that good stuff. I just needed to vent and explain my frustrations and my little journey to getting something that seemed simple to work. :B (that's a smiley face with buck teeth, by the way)

I did more things!

Today's entry is brought to you by the inspirational Bloodstone and Diamonds by Machine Head and every song Amon Amarth has ever made.

Don't be too alarmed, but I've made some maps. Like, actual progress. I've made six (big) maps in total so far and redone the cliff tiles in three of my previous maps, because I realised that the tiles I was using were really pixelated, and I never understood why they looked kinda weird.

But I digress.

Here's a screenshot so you know I'm not lying.