RPG VX ACE TUT 1-9

Make Your Own Game Tutorial IV: Equipment, Items, and Features

Shops! Priority needs to be set to Same as Characters so that
you can’t walk over him, and the Trigger needs to be set to
Now that we’ve put our toes in the shallow end of Action button so that the event activates when the player
eventing with cosmetic events and quick event creation, its hits the Action button while facing it.
finally time to really look at a custom scripted event. Let’s
make a shop so that players can buy some stuff. Now look over at the large section on the right side of
the event. Double click on the @> end line to insert a new
In the example game, I have a spot set up for a event command into the event.
travelling merchant who can’t leave town until a nearby Note: You can right click insert as well. You can also right click
landslide is cleared up. to edit an event command, or right click to delete an existing
event command.
While in the event layer, let’s right click between the
crate of fish and crate of tomatoes and hit New Event. You The next thing you need to do is DON’T BE
should already know how to set the Graphic from Tutorial INTIMIDATED. Yes there are a lot of options, but we can
II. Make sure you set the Priority and Trigger correctly. learn them a little bit at a time. Switch to the third tab and
find Shop Processing in the Scene Control Group.

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Make Your Own Game Tutorial IV: Equipment, Items, and Features

Shops! (cont.) Now, let’s add some messages before and after the
shop window so that our Merchant can actually talk to us.
In shop processing, you can just double click to
bring up the goods window and add any item or piece of First, double click on the Shop Procession event
equipment you want to the list of things they will sell. command in your window, this will insert a new event
command above it in the event. (Events always run from
the top to the bottom unless event commands change the
processing order)

In the message group on tab 1 of the event commands,
select show text.

You can let it set it to use the Standard price, or a Write in some appropriately worded text for our
custom price if you want. merchant to say and select a face graphic to use. Be careful
about going over the limit per line. If you are worried, click
After you are done, just click OK and you have a the preview button to see what it will look like in game.
working shop. Unfortunately, its a bit boring. You click the
action button on him in game and the shop menu pops up
and when you are done shopping, it goes away.

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Make Your Own Game Tutorial IV: Equipment, Items, and Features

Shops! (cont.) Tutorial Wrapup

Repeat this step to give him some text after the shop In this tutorial, we have covered a LOT of important
menu goes away by double clicking on the @> at the end of things.
the event. Now you have a nice working shop!
First we explored how the point of equipment in
Your even should now resemble the screenshot below most RPGs and things to keep in mind when designing it.
After that we went over how to design them in the editor.

We also got introduced to the very important Features
system that RPG Maker VX Ace brings to bear. Features
allow us a ton of customization.

After that, we went over how to create Treasure chests
using the Quick Event Creation system.

Finally, we got further into the basics of eventing
by writing a working event from scratch, a Shop for our
characters to buy equipment from.

Next Tutorial Preview

In the next tutorial, we will be getting back to mapping,
this time focusing on World Maps and Dungeons!

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Make Your Own Game Tutorial V: Other Types of Maps

What Kind of Maps Will We Cover? Different Map Types taken from the VX Ace Sample Maps

We will view maps using the following categories.
Exterior Safe: This covers most town exteriors, as well as any
outside area that has no encounters.
Interior Safe: This covers the insides of buildings in towns
primarily, but also covers friendly castles, temples and other
similar places.
Man-made Dungeon: This covers any area that a player will
travel through which will have encounters, and is based in
a building or other sentient being based structure.
Natural Dungeon: This covers not only the obvious (caves),
but also things like forests, or any other natural occurring
environment with monsters.
World Maps: While not universal in RPGs, this is a common
map type, and one we will be using in our example game
This is the main map that you will travel on to link together
maps that are distant from one another.
We will be making three interior safe maps, and one each of
the dungeons and a world map in this tutorial.

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Make Your Own Game Tutorial V: Other Types of Maps

Things You Should Already Know This Tutorial Reads a Little Different

Because this is continuing on our mapping knowledge Unlike earlier tutorials, this tutorial will spend less
that we first explored in Tutorial II: Intro to Mapping, there time on the specifics of what is being done, and more on
are a number of things you should already know before the structured approach and thought processes I use to get
starting this Tutorial: to the end goal.

• How to create a new map and adjust the map properties The reason for this is that after mastering the basic
• The different layer tools in the map editor. skills, mapping is mostly just an individual process and set
• The different brush tools available of tastes. Every person will map differently. Because of this,
the main purpose of this tutorial is to showcase different
• About the tile tabs and their relationship to layers. types of maps, and to walk you through a single perspective
• How to shift copy and shift paste tile sections. (my own) that will be used to create the maps.
• How to use cosmetic events.
You will most likely find your own methods and
If any of these sound unfamiliar to you, take a moment processes the more you practice, and this is a good thing.
to go back to Tutorial II and refresh yourself there. My approach generally involves starting with a base and
building on top of it, but you might work better working
These techniques will not be explained but will be on smaller areas at a time.
used in this tutorial and without a firm grasp of the basics
you will quickly get lost. Both are valid approaches, and there are a million
other approaches as well. Find the approach that works for
you and practice practice practice. Time is the best teacher
of good mapping.

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Make Your Own Game Tutorial V: Other Types of Maps

Village Elder’s House Floor 1 Village Elder’s House Floor 2 Storage Shack

First, I’m going to fill in the interiors of the two Now I select an appropriate wall top tile (in the A Tab
buildings I created in Tutorial II when making the outside of the tileset). Since all three of these buildings are wood,
area around the Village Elder’s house. I select the older looking wood autotile for the Storage
Shack, and the newer wood autotile for both floors of the
I will be making three maps at the same time here, as Village Elder’s House.
the methods used are the same.
From this point I draw the basic shape of the
To start the map, I will create a map using the Interior building. Don’t try and keep the insides the same size as
tileset in the Map Properties. 17 x 13 tiles is the minimum the outside, just keep the same general shape, and keep the
size of a VX Ace map, and in this case, I believe all three can scale between buildings similar. I settle on a scale of ~2:1
be made in that size or less. between inside:outside dimensions.

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Make Your Own Game Tutorial V: Other Types of Maps

Village Elder’s House Floor 1 Village Elder’s House Floor 2 Storage Shack

Next, using the same wall top tile, divide each map single long room for a library. This will be used to put a
into the rooms that will be in the building. few books for the player to read to fill him in on the myth
and lore of the world. On the right is a meeting area and
Always keep in mind what you are going to put in kitchen. The small middle room is a place to put stairs.
each area. Don’t divide up the buildings without a plan,
otherwise you will probably spend most of your time The upper floor is divided from left to right into the
mapping moving walls around to adjust to what you are Village Elder’s bedroom, hallway, and Ryan’s bedroom.
putting in. Ryan’s bedroom will be used to heal up the party.

In the first floor of the Village Elder’s house I divide The storage shack remains the same at this point, as it
the map into three “rooms”. On the left, I am creating a doesn’t need rooms.

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Make Your Own Game Tutorial V: Other Types of Maps

Village Elder’s House Floor 1 Village Elder’s House Floor 2 Storage Shack

Switch your tile to a wall tile. Generally you can use First of all, notice that while a vertical wall section
the wall tile that matches up with the wall top you used, is only one tile wide, a horizontal wall section is three tiles
but you can switch it up if you feel you need to. wide.

In this case, I feel the matched tiles look best. Place Because of this, you have to sometimes stretch things
two tiles below each horizontal wall top tile section. You from top to bottom to fit in things you need. As an example,
can go with one tile high walls if you desire, but the RTP is in the last step, it looked like I was leaving a lot of room for
designed around two tile high by default. the stairs in that small middle room on the lower floor.

Because of this, there are some things to keep in mind In reality, I was leaving only a single floor tile area to
when mapping out a room. place it on.

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Make Your Own Game Tutorial V: Other Types of Maps

Village Elder’s House Floor 1 Village Elder’s House Floor 2 Storage Shack

Now that we have walls, the next thing we need are For the storage shack, I just select some dirt floor. No
floors. Look at the floor tiles available to you, and identify reason for them to have put in flooring material.
ones that will be useful for you.
I also take the time here to cut out doors. Remember
For the Village Elder’s House, I select the horizontal that if you have a passageway going from left to right, rather
running hardwood floors for the majority of the house, and than top to bottom, you will need to cut away on tile of the
a simple checkered tile floor for the kitchen area. ceiling for floor and replace two with wall tiles. Right click
copying makes this much faster.
Try and make sure the tile matches the area not just
visibly but logically. A village elder in a small mountain I went ahead and put the stairs in place as well. Make
town isn’t going to have expensive looking carpet. sure their locations match up from the top to bottom floor.

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Make Your Own Game Tutorial V: Other Types of Maps

Village Elder’s House Floor 1 Village Elder’s House Floor 2 Storage Shack

Now its time to fill the rooms. You might think this and books all over the floor, along with barrels, bags of
step should be much longer, but in reality almost all the grain, etc? No, probably not. People tend to keep things
things in this step are very similar. relatively clean, so don’t try to clutter up living spaces unless
a character is specifically rather messy.
Aside from the counter autotile used for the table and
desks which are on Tab A, the rest of the tiles are all on Tile Another thing to keep in mind is placing items against
B and C. Select tiles that match the area you are putting walls. Because of the way the RTP is designed, if you place
them in, try and fill up the large areas of blank space. a single item like a stove or bookshelf against a wall, it is
best to cover the entire wall to avoid the bottom of the
Try not to just put tiles down to create clutter though. wall being visible. This keeps players from noticing that the
Look around your own living room. Do you have papers bottom of the shelf is in the same place as the wall bottom.

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Make Your Own Game Tutorial V: Other Types of Maps

Next, let’s turn our attention to creating a World Next I turn my attention to something I mentioned
Map. First, I create a map using the Field tileset with a size in Tutorial IV. The Merchant was trapped in the village
of 40 x 30 tiles. because of a landslide. Of course, I would need mountains
anyway for the village, but this gives me a clue to the
When creating a World Map, don’t make it larger location we will need to place them.
than you really need. Its hard to fill in too much space.
I create a ridge of mountains blocking travelling
The first thing to do is just draw a vague shape for outside of the area I’m working with to the southeast. I
what you are working with the primary tile you will be create a single pass that I will have blocked by a worker
using for that landmass (in this case, grass). later.

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Make Your Own Game Tutorial V: Other Types of Maps

Let’s dress up our mountain range. Thinking back to my items, I remember that I have
First, grab the hill tile. Generally you don’t have ice crystals as a drop item. Well it makes sense to have these
mountains turning directly into plains. So why don’t we drop from monsters in snowy areas.
put hills all around the mountains.
Along with hills, since this was an area that was I switch to the snow autotile and paint the northern
preventing travel, why don’t we put some really high peaks tip of the peninsula I had created. It still looks a little bland,
in there as well. These are found in Tile B. You use these so I draw a pine forest in the snowy area.
just like we did large tree tiles in the village map.
To lap some of flora, I extend the pine forest into the
grasslands to the south of it.

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Make Your Own Game Tutorial V: Other Types of Maps

But where will we put our dungeon? I like the idea Now for the finishing touches.
of a fiery volcano dungeon, so why don’t we build it on a I start by placing my locations. I place the village
separate island. elder’s house over near the mountains in the hilly areas,
then place a volcano with a small ruins in front of it on the
I build it originally with rock ground autotile, then island.
lap a bit of volcanic ground autotile near the center. Next, I put a dock for a small boat, and connect the
pass, dock, and town with paths. Finally, I drop a few extra
I use a different type of mountains in to have a place tiles in to break up the grassland.
to put my volcano. As a side note this also gives me a good
place for monsters to drop fire crystals.

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Make Your Own Game Tutorial V: Other Types of Maps

For my dungeon, I want to have a temple ruin that Now I proceed to make interior rooms. Don’t over
opens up in the back into a lava cave. The temple ruin will think it when you are creating man-made structures and
obviously fit in the man-made dungeon category. put in mazes and such (unless it was specifically made as a
maze).
I start this similar to how I would an interior safe
map. First start a new map with the Dungeon tileset. You In general humans create symmetrical designs, or
will want this to be bigger so to provide more area for your close enough to symmetrical. We also favor straight walls
player to travel. This map is 30 x 20 tiles. and precise angles in our designs. With that in mind I create
a main room, a hallway, and two side rooms.
I pick a wall top tile and draw out the building outline.

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Make Your Own Game Tutorial V: Other Types of Maps

Now its time to put in the walls. Now I fill in the floors. Being a temple, I decided to
I create the interior walls two high, while the outside go with a slate tile floor tile for both the interior, as well as
walls are three high. This is so I can throw in a height change for the outside stoop section. I thought about using two
to create an outside stoop. types of tiles inside, but felt it was unnecessary.
Remember to always keep overall height differences
from the “ground” level in mind when creating the walls. If Remember the fill tool, no reason to put these in a
you don’t always go the same number of tiles from two areas single tile at a time.
of the same height, you create an incorrect perspective.
For outside the building I pick a grey rocky terrain, as
we are sitting right outside of a volcano.

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Make Your Own Game Tutorial V: Other Types of Maps

In this step, I’ve done several things. First, I’ve cut out In this last step, I put in decorations. Most of these
for the doors. In this one I did all vertical passageways. I set are crumbling cracks in the walls and floor and rubble.
them symmetrical for balance, this was a temple after all.
I place a cave-like doorway in the back which will
The second thing I did was put in stairs. Since its old head into the fire cave. It will remain hidden until the
and abandoned, I pick the crumbling stairs. player finishes a small riddle puzzle that is based on the
dragon statue and the two tablets on the walls.
The last thing I did was make the building look like it
was built into the rock face by building cliffs on either side. Try not to overdo the cracks and destruction though,
Remember, varying height is interesting to the eye. too much and it looks repetitive.

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Make Your Own Game Tutorial V: Other Types of Maps

Varying Barriers

Now I can move on to the last map we will be making This is a good time to stop and talk about a bit of
in this tutorial: The Fire Cave. map building theory that I’ve discovered while working on
my own maps.
With caves, I tend to start with the “wall top” tile and
fill the entire map (this one is 40 x 30). Then I carve out A lot of people when they create caves, rely solely on
using the floor tile and fill in what I carve out. cave walls to keep players in. This is functional, but not
incredibly pretty.
I skipped the individual steps as putting in walls
should be familiar to you at this point. Try not to draw too Instead, try to vary what blocks the players path. In a
the walls too straight. Caves are more chaotic, being made cave you can have all kinds of barriers:
by nature, rather than human hands.
• Cave Walls
• Water
• Lava

• Height changes
• Rubble

• Man-Made barriers like jail bars

By varying the kinds of barriers you use you can create
a much more visually appealing map.

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Make Your Own Game Tutorial V: Other Types of Maps

This map overall grew much more organically, and At this point, I continue to add varying barriers.
much less structured. In an odd way, this mirrors its natural I add in some height changes, and actually convert
origin. some areas that were originally walls into walkable areas.
At this point we learn another cool feature of autotiles: You
The first thing I did is bring in some lava to vary the can walk on top of autotile walls as long as you have a way
barriers imposed in my map. Being inside a volcano, I felt to get up there.
this was a natural choice. The raised walkable sections look like the same tile
as the lower walkable sections, but actually aren’t, its a wall
Also, don’t be afraid to alter the shape of what you top tile with the same design.
originally had if it looks better. Map making is all about
constant adjustments, nothing is written in stone.

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Make Your Own Game Tutorial V: Other Types of Maps

Now I add in some spots in the lava that you can’t In this stage I add a lot of detail, as well as a raise
actually reach. Why put things down you can’t reach? man-made temple style area for the boss fight.
Because it breaks up the lava visually.
I used a darker lava stone tile to break up the walkable
You will also notice the large amount of shift copy- area a bit visually, and used smaller pools of lava regularly
pasting I’ve used on the lava. Since the lava isn’t ending so it is almost always visible. I also decided to cut all the
right where the wall tops are, we need to get rid of the way into one walkable area and place a bridge down.
“shore” it builds in the autotile.
One thing to keep in mind is you have to shift click
Shift right click appropriate lava tiles and shift left the area right to the south of the stone steps so that it doesn’t
click to put them in place to get rid of these shores. have the edge of the autotile, otherwise it won’t be passable.

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Make Your Own Game Tutorial V: Other Types of Maps

Tutorial Wrapup

In my last step, I just polish up what I already have. We’ve covered a lot in this tutorial and have made a
I decided that the area for the boss fight didn’t look lot of visual progress on our game.
man-made enough, it was too irregular in shape. I changed
it to be more symmetrical. We have gone over creating several map types and
I also cut a lava river all the way down the middle, how they are different and how they are similar.
and cut away more of the outside with lava.
Finally, I added a ton of height differences into the We created three interior maps for buildings in the
walls. These serve no functional purpose, but breaks up mountain village map we made in Tutorial II, two floors for
repetitive parts of the map. the village elder’s house, and a small shack.

We built a world map with varying geography
to connect together our locations, and two connecting
dungeon maps, one a man made ruined temple, the other a
natural cave in a volcano.

Next Tutorial Preview

In the next tutorial we will be creating the random
encounters that our heroes will come across. We will go
over two important encounter components, balancing
encounters and encounter variety. We will also discuss
experience and character growth.

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Make Your Own Game Tutorial VI: Creating Encounters Part 1

Purpose of Encounters

Encounters in roleplaying games serve several points. The experience the characters receive allows them
purposes, and being aware of these purposes is important to go up in level, while the gold is used to buy better
to designing your own games. There are two purposes that equipment.
are more prominent than the others.
The other way it promotes progression is that
The first is challenge. encounters can progress the story. Boss fights are one
Without challenge, a video game would just be a example of this. Another is encounters that drop items that
slightly interactive movie. While there are some works in you need to complete the current portion of your quest.
that direction, for the most part, games need challenge of
some sort.
In RPGs the two major form of challenges are generally
encounters and puzzles, and in most cases the majority fo
challenges fit into the former.
The second purpose is progression.
There are two ways encounters promote progression.
The first of which, and what we will focus on in this tutorial
is character growth.
In a standard RPG, as the characters wins more and
more encounters, they accrues more gold and experience

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Make Your Own Game Tutorial VI: Creating Encounters Part 1

Encounter Areas Now that we have looked at why we have encounters,
we can begin to plan out how we want to lay out those
encounters.

The first thing to do is look at all the maps you have
created that are going to be “danger” maps where encounters
can occur. I have made three of those maps for the sample
game: The World Map, The Ruins, and The Fire Cave.

So now we need to decide what enemies should be
encountered in each map. But wait, what if we want one
map to have different encounters in different areas? That is
where Region IDs come in, which will be explained after
we determine the individual encounter areas (distinct areas
with their own encounters) we will use.

I decide to divide my world map up by geographical
area, and leave both the other maps as just one encounter
area each.

So I have the following encounter areas: World Map:
Grass, World Map: Hills, World Map: Forest, World Map:
Snow, World Map: Volcanic Island, The Ruins, and The
Fire Cave.

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Make Your Own Game Tutorial VI: Creating Encounters Part 1

Using the Region ID Layer Though you can’t select the fill tool, you can use the
drag left click to select clusters of the same Region ID. This
With the encounter areas decided, we now need to layer operates independantly of the others, so you don’t
divide up our World Map into areas. have to worry about it copying the graphics when copying.

We do that by using the Region ID layer. In the Map After you finish wth the grass, paint the other terrain
Editor switch to the World Map. Once there, switch to the types in your map with different numbers based on the
Region ID layer. The button for this is between the Event encounter areas you set up previously. I used 2 for Forests,
Layer button and your pen tools. 3 for Hills, and 4 for Snow (Snowy forests included).

Once there your tile palette will be replaced with
incredibly gaudy colors with numbers on them from 1 to
63. Don’t worry, they don’t show up in game.

Select the number you will be using for grass (in
my case 1, and paint across all your grass tiles. It operates
identically to the pen tool.

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Make Your Own Game Tutorial VI: Creating Encounters Part 1

Now that we’ve divided it out, I’m going to take one
more step that has more to do with personal preference.

A lot of people don’t like world maps very much, and
one of the reasons is that its just filler for encounters. To
help prevent this problem, I decided to make roadways not
have any encounters.

To do this, I just selected the null Region ID (upper
left of the palette) and erase the Region ID off of the road.
To help with people who don’t quite follow the road exactly,
I spread the null Region ID out one tile away from it. I’ll
set an NPC somewhere to tell the players that roads are safe
for travel.

After I finish up the mainland, I’m going to take a
quick jaunt down to the volcanic island and I can paint
that with 5.

Now we’ve set up all the Region IDs so that we can
use them to seperate encounter areas.

Region IDs, much like Noteboxes, can also have
additional uses added through scripts.

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Make Your Own Game Tutorial VI: Creating Encounters Part 1

The Experience Curve Milestones and Expected Level

Experience progression is a hard thing to balance and All games have milestones in their progression of
it has a lot of moving parts. To begin with, I’m going to plot. These are points in the game where you tend to open
discuss those moving parts, then I will discuss how they up more encounter areas, or when they fight a boss fight.
interact.
Every milestone shoud have an expected level. This
The first part is the experience curve itself. The is the level that the encounters are designed around for
experience curve is the total experience needed to get to each difficulty. Being higher level will make the area easier, and
level. In the example game, I’m leaving this at the default. being lower level will make it harder.
Below is the default experience curve in RPG Maker VX
Ace. Your job as a game designer is to make sure that most
players end up as close to expected level for each portion of
the game unless they do some really heavy grinding or skip
a lot of stuff.

The example game has the following milestones with
expected levels listed:

• Start: Level 1
• Obtain Boat: Level 4
• Open Fire Cave: Level 5
• Face Final Boss: Level 6

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Make Your Own Game Tutorial VI: Creating Encounters Part 1

Average Number of Encounters per Area this expect a lot of complaints
Another option, is to require the player to get a certain
This one is much harder to nail down and you will
have to playtest to figure it out. number of drops for a quest before progressing.
In the example game, there will be a boat sitting at
What you want to discover is the average number of
encounters you will interact with in a certain area, if you the end of the dock on the world map so that players can
go directly for what you need to reach your next milestone. travel to the volcanic island. But what is keeping characters
Since most players aren’t going to go directly at it, you from walking straight too it and going directly to a higher
should probably add about 20% to that number just to get expected level encounter area?
a better idea of what most players will do.
In this case, I’m going to add in a short quest of
This is the one variable in character progression that collecting some wood from plant type enemies in order to
is the hardest to adjust. The other variables you can change fix the boat. This requires the player to stick around the area
directly, you can change the experience curve directly, and until he has gone through a certain amount of encounters
you can change your expected level just by balancing around to get those drops. (This will be added in a later tutorial,
a different level. but it is important to know it will be done in this tutorial.)

But it isn’t impossible to change this variable. The
most direct way to change it is to add distance between two
points, making it just take longer to travel.

You can also just make encounters more common,
though at a certain point this angers players. No one wants
to fight every three steps, and if you design a game around

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Make Your Own Game Tutorial VI: Creating Encounters Part 1

Planning Encounters in RMVX Ace Planning Enemies

We’ll get to putting all those variables together in a The first thing we need to do is create ememies for
minute, but first, we need to learn how to set up encounters each encounter area. The way I find easiest to do this is to
so that we can measure average encounters through create another spreadsheet to match enemies to area.
playtesting.
I start using a combination of the area and my
Encounters are built in two tabs in the Database: available graphics to lay out some monster ideas. Make sure
Enemies Tab: The Enemies Tab is where you build individual that it makes sense for the area. For an example, I selected
enemies the Plant monster Battler to create my Man-Eating Plant,
Trooops Tab: The Troops Tab is where you put groups of which logically resides in the Forest area. Try to make sure
individual enemies into specific encounters for the player you have several differnt monsters for each area.
to encounter.
Another thing I add is a Type Column. In this column
This is an intuitive approach, and will be the same I pop down a short description of its gameplay mechanics.
approach we will take while designing the encounters for Make sure to makes some variety in how they play. Variety
each encounter area. is one of the most important things in Encounter Design.

The first thing I suggest to do is get familiar with all
your available monster graphics. For the example game, I
am going to be using RTP monsters only. Go to the Enemies
tab in the database double click on a monster graphic, and
scroll down through the graphics available to you.

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Make Your Own Game Tutorial VI: Creating Encounters Part 1

Putting the Enemies into Troops The combination of enemies will create very different
encounters. Above is one of my encounters. I labeled how
Now, you can repeat the same process by combining I would approach it as a player, which is influenced by the
the individual enemies you created into planned troops. amount of threat the enemies pose to me.
Make sure you have a variety of different possible encounters
in each area. Below, even though the Wendigo is a bigger threat,
I would prioritize the two imps as they are quicker to kill.
I aimed for 5 encounter types in each area, plus 3 Variety creates multiple required approaches, which requires
special encounters at the bottom that will be used for a players to think through their actions.
item drop collection quests.

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Make Your Own Game Tutorial VI: Creating Encounters Part 1

Laying out the Framework: Enemies Tab Instead of trying to put everything in at once and
eyeball the EXP and Gold, we are going to set up encounters
The first action we are going to take is to set up the so that we can easily test areas to get all the variables we
framework in the Database. need so that we reach our milestones at the levels we want.

Go to the Enemy Tab of the database. For this pass First go through and name all your Enemies based on
through, we will only be concerned with the section shown what you planned out in your spreadsheets.
below:
Second, set all their stats to 1, this will let us fight
through them quickly during the encounter rate testing.

Third, set the Battler Graphics. Use the Hue slider to
change the Battler color!

http://www.rpgmakerweb.com/ Fourth, set any quest drops in to judge how long it
takes to acquire them. I’m setting the Man-Eater Plant to
drop a new item: Morph Logs, which will be used to fix the
boat.

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Make Your Own Game Tutorial VI: Creating Encounters Part 1

Laying out the Framework: Troops Tab From there, you can drag the the monsters around
on to set them how they will appear in the encounter. I
Next, we can set things up in the Troops Tab. Flip personally like to break up the horizontal top and bottom
your spreadsheet over to your encounter groups and start lines created when you added them. Move them around to
filling them in. get a more “random” look.

All you have to do is select the monster you want on
the right, and click Add to put them in the encounter...

... and repeat as needed until the encounter is filled. You can name your Troops however you want, but
I prefer just to click the Autoname button to finish our
current work in the Troops Tab.

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Make Your Own Game Tutorial VI: Creating Encounters Part 1

Laying out the Framework: Map Properties On this, there are only three things to pick from:
1. Troop. Here just select the troop you want to apply
Save your work in the Database and close it out by to the map.
hitting OK (You should be saving regularly using the Apply 2. Weight. This determines how common the
button, You don’t want to lose all that work you are putting encounter is in its areas. The higher the more common they
in). Right click on one of your World Map and select Map will be. I left it on 10 for all the encounteres except the
Properties. We are interested in the Encounters section Wisp encounters, which I wanted a bit rarer and set to 5.
shown on the right below. 3. Range. This determines where on the map this
encounter will show up. On the two dungeon maps, we can
Double click on the list to open up a new Encounter just select Whole Map for all of them, but on the World
for this map. Map we will need to select by Region ID. You can select up
to 3 Region IDs per Encounter. If you need more Region
IDs (like the Orcs*2 Encounter) just add it again and add
the other Region IDs there.
The only other thing to adjust here is Steps Average,
which determines the average number of steps between
encounters on the map. It is below the encounter list.

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Make Your Own Game Tutorial VI: Creating Encounters Part 1

Connecting Maps with Transfer Events On the New Transfer Event Popup, we ony have two
options. The direction option will change what direction our
To do our testing, we need to connect together all character is facing after being transfered. For the moment, I
our maps with Transfer Events, so that it is easy to test our will leave this on retain.
encounter areas.
To change the destination, just click on the ...
To do this go back to your World Map and switch and select the map and coordinates you want the player
to the Event Layer. In this section I wil build the transfer transfered to. Repeat until all of your exit and entrance
event between the World Map and the Village. You can points have transfer events.
build the rest of the transfers following the same method.

Right click on your transfer location and select Quick
Event Creation => Transfer.

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Make Your Own Game Tutorial VI: Creating Encounters Part 1

Placing Player/Boat Starting Positions Changing Tile Passability

Now, you may wonder how we are going to get from Now we can walk across all our maps at one ti... But
the mainland to the island while playtesting. wait! We can’t walk on that dock!

We are going to place the starting position for the I actually made this mistake when I built the original
boat. To do this, while on the event layer, right click the map. I had assumed that the passability of that tile was set
location below and select Set as Starting Position => Boat. to allow us to walk on it, but it wasn’t. Luckily this gives me
a great time to talk about changing passability.
Repeat this somewhere in the Village but instead
select Set as Starting Position => Player. Open up the Field Tileset in the Tileset Tab and
switch to Tab B. You will see that the two “Dock” tiles are
set to X passability.

Just click on them to cycle the passability until it
changes to O.

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Make Your Own Game Tutorial VI: Creating Encounters Part 1

Testing to a Milestone Shown above is a table I created while testing to
the first milestone 3 times. I then calculated the number
Now we have access to everything we need to test the of enemies I encountered averaged between those three
average number of encounters to each milestone. playthoughs.

To get to the first milestone, the player will need to This may seem tedius, and it is. All great games require
collect 3 Morph Logs from Man-Eater Plants. Since we will tons of playtesting.
tell them when they are looking at the boat they will need
this, we can move directly walking around the forests to
find encounters with them.

I also go on the assumption that the player will do one
of the two available sidequests available to them up to this
point. For this he will need to collect three Lightning Gems
from Lightning Wisps. (I set them to drop a Lightning
Gem on every encounter).

Play through the section several times attempting to
get these specific items. Record the number of times you
run into each encounter group, and then calculate the total
number of enemies you fought.

I counted Lightning Wisps as two enemies, as I wanted
them to give twice as much experience as other enemies.

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Make Your Own Game Tutorial VI: Creating Encounters Part 1

Putting it All Together Tutorial Wrapup

Now that we know this, we can determine how much In this tutorial, we have learned how to plan out the
experience each enemy should give on average if all other encounters we will have in our game. We discussed enemy
variables remain the same. and encounter variety, and how it forces players to think.

The average number we reached was ~64 enemies. I We then moved on to implementing the framework
would round this up to 70 since we were going directly at for the encounters in the editor itself and how to use the
the goals and not everyone would do that. Hue changing function to make Battler Graphics different
colors.
Since we need to reach level 4 from level 1, the player
should gain at least 366 experience across 70 enemies. Since We also made transfer events, set starting positions of
366/70 = 5.23, we can round up to around 6 xp per enemy vehicles and players, and changed passability of tiles. And
on the mainland. finally, we worked out how to test using our framework to
determine how much XP our enemies should give.
We could also do other things if this amount doesn’t
work well for us. We could require less Morph Logs or Next Tutorial Preview
Elemental Gems to finish the quests, we could change the
drop rates of the items, or we could even change the weights In the next tutorial, we will continue to work
of the enemies that drop them. on Encounters. We will work on balancing individual
encounters for our party’s expected level, and balancing the
One thing I did notice was that 30 steps is way too party’s skills to the encounters we are building. We will also
high with such a small world map with safe paths. I changed build our final boss.
it to 15 for my second and third tests and it worked much
better.

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Make Your Own Game Tutorial VII: Creating Encounters Part 2

Aspects of Encounter Balance

Despite what you might think, Encounter Balance Strategy: Strategy is a level of how much good choices on the
is not all about difficulty. Difficulty is a portion, but there part of the player, such as party composition, equipment
are many moving parts that you want to take into account choices, and in battle skill use affects the Duration, Danger,
when designing encounters. and Toll of the encounter.
Swing: Swing is how much randomness, such as battle
So lets look at what I consider the important aspects surprise, enemy skill usage, or enemy evasion, affects the
Duration: Duration is how long the encounter lasts. In Duration, Danger, and Toll of the encounter.
general, with nonboss encounters, I prefer duration to stay
low. Going into medium length in a nonboss encounter is
ok, but make sure the time to reward (exp/gold) ration still
stays good. No one wants to fight a battle and earn 5 xp and
4 gold when they could fight three in the same amount of
time for 3 xp and 2 gold each.
Danger: Danger is the likelihood of the player losing an
encounter. for nonboss encounters, this can range from low
to high, depending on how you handle other aspects.
Toll: Toll is the amount of resources the battle will tend
to exhuast. This includes HP, MP, potions, or any other
expendable resource the player has. this can range from
mid to almost non existant, depending on encounter style.

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Aspect Interaction This works well in games where you can save anywhere.
Both of these playstyles can be reinforced heavily
Now that we’ve gone over the five major aspects I by rating what the average encounter in each of the five
use to balance encounters, let’s talk about how they work encounter aspects.
together. How they work together can create a cohesive feel
for your game, as well as add even more variety to your Attritions requires fairly low ratings all around. But
encounters. with a high enough toll to matter over time.

First, let’s look at two styles of gameplay that can Immediate danger requires high danger and trivially
illustrate how you can add a cohesive feel through balancing low toll. You want to prevent to much swing when doing high
encounters properly. These two styles are by no means the danger encounters as it this can lead to player frustration.
only ones, but are a good representative of RPG designs. High strategy works well in this style as well.

The first style I will call attrition encounters. With
attrition encounters, no single encounter is dangerous, but
they instead add up over time.

This works well for games with save points, where the
challenge isn’t from any single moment (outside perhaps
boss battles), but instead from the extended challenge of
making it from one save point to the next.

To compare let’s look at another style I’ll call
immediate danger encounters. With immediate danger
encounters every encounter has a chance to wipe you out.

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Establishing a Baseline lower than a standard character. Why? So that encounter
duration stays short.
For the sample game, I’m going to be using the
Attrition model, as it is a bit simpler to balance and allows Its important that encounter duration stays short
more leeway. when using the Attrition model, as the idea is the character
to go through many battles, and no one wants to slog
Now that we’ve decided on that, we can start looking through a ton of long battles. Below is the first set of stats
at assigning stats and skills to individual enemies. The best I set for the Orc.
place to start is with what I would consider the “baseline”.

The baseline is the most average enemy you have. All
other enemies can be created by starting with the base and
then adjusting it for the expected level of the area and their
individual type.

My baseline enemy is the Orc. He appears across
the entire world map and is meant to be a bog standard
encounter filler.

Let’s develop the plan of attack for how we will create
the orc. He is baseline, but has no magic, so we can set his
MP and Magic Attack low. He doesn’t use them at all.

His Attack and Defense are good to set to slightly
above a level 1 character, but we need to make his HP much

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Make Your Own Game Tutorial VII: Creating Encounters Part 2

Battle Testing The tabs allow you to add up to 4 characters into the
battle test. When you have the party set you want, go ahead
Now we can test these orcs out in a battle. and hit OK. I decided to test this fight with only Ryan.
Go to the troops tab, select the Orcx2 encounter and
click on Battle Test. This will pop up a window where we After I played through it about 3 times, I noticed that
can select the characters, shown below. Ryan wasn’t really suffering much damage, and he would
start killing them in one shot after a level or two.

At this point, I altered the Orc’s stats as follows:

Here you can select characters, and set their level and
equpment.

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Make Your Own Game Tutorial VII: Creating Encounters Part 2

Adding Skills

Right now, our Orc is somewhat balanced for what For the moment, leave the conditions on Always. We
we want (we will do heavier playtesting in game later when will discuss conditions more when creating our boss fight.
we are polishing), but he is pretty boring. Select Focus for the skill you want to add.

Just attack after attack and nothing to break it up. The Rating is the likelihood the skill will be performed.
My initial thought was to add guard in, but all that does Basically the higher the number, the more likely the AI will
is increase the duration of the encounter. Since we want to select it over other applicable skills. I started with it set to 1.
keep duration short, this is a bad choice.

Instead, I decided to give it the option to Focus. I
could have created a new skill for the Orcs, but this one
works perfectly. Buffs alter which enemies we see as priority
targets, which is a great way to add variety to encounters.

The first thing we need to do is double click an empty
space in the Action Patterns section.

This will bring up the box for a new put in a new
potential action for the enemy to take.

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Make Your Own Game Tutorial VII: Creating Encounters Part 2

More Battle Testing! Other Enemies

And now, we go back to battle testing again! Honestly, From here, you can use the Orc as a basis to create
get used to doing this. A lot. There is just no way around it, other enemies.
without testing, your game balance will be awful.
Take the stats the Orc has, raise and lower them based
I play through with the Orc again, and I notice that on the type of enemy (fast vs slow, def vs offense) to create
he is rarely ever using his Focus attack, so there is no real a wide variety. Also, be sure to adjust for the expected level
change from how things were going before I added in the of the party.
skill.
Don’t be shy about makin new skills either. I created
With a quick trip back to the enemies tab, I change several elemental attacks for the various wisps. And KEEP
the rating of the skill to 3, and then finally after another TESTING. Constantly test all your battles. Get used to
bout of playtesting, down to 2. seeing the screen below. Also, keep in mind your encounter
style.
At this point, they seem to be performing the action
often, but not too much. Perfect!

There are other things I learned from these battle
tests. Pommel Strike is a great skill for Ryan, as it takes one
of the Orcs out of the fight while I can focus on the other.

This shows that some level of strategy can cut down
on the Danger and Toll of the encounters. Alone he can
take out the two nearly every time, with some damage.

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Make Your Own Game Tutorial VII: Creating Encounters Part 2

Encounter Aspects and Boss Fights Planning the Boss Fight: Story

Now that we’ve gotten all the regular encounters out A boss fight, especially the final boss fight, is a really
of the way, let’s focus on the boss fight. important concern both from a gameplay perspective and a
story perspective. I want to create a villain who can cause a
Unlike regular encounters, boss fights get to break lot of damage, but isn’t individually a great threat.
the rules of your encounter style completely.
The villain for the sample game
Danger is almost universally high during boss fights, is known as Morris. Morris is a cultist
Duration ends up longer than the average, Toll is generally who wants to resurrect an ancient evil.
not a concern as most boss fights are at the end of areas.
While a major player in the cult,
As with most encounters with high Danger, you he isn’t the leader, leaving room for the
want to keep Swing down. No one wants to die due to sample game to be expanded at a later
randomness. Every time a player loses, they should be date if I want to.
blaming themselves (“If I had chosen to heal then instead of
pressing the attack, I wouldn’t have lost!”), not your game. He also has a connection with
Winter, allowing some interactions on
Strategy is the one part of an encounter that we can that front. His plan is to break a magical
vary pretty heavily with boss fights depending on how seal in the ruins on the volcanic island
“casual” or “hardcore” you want the game to be. that helps hold the ancient evil.

For the example game, I’m going to try for around He is accompanied by his
a 5 on a scale of 1-10 for Strategy. I want the game to be personal pet, an incredibly aggressive
accessible, while still being interesting. three headed cerberus.

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Planning the Boss Fight: Mechanics I give him Darkness and Distracting Strike, allowing
him to debuff and apply a negative status to the characters.
Mechanicly, creating a boss fight is not much different For the moment I leave them at Rating 3.
from creating a regular encounter. The only real difference is
everything is custom crafted for that encounter specifically, Giving him an ability to heal both himself and
and being longer, you need to create more variety to enemy Cerberus when he is low on HP is also a good idea. That is
actions to keep it interesting. where we will work with Conditions in the Action Patterns.

I decided to do a two enemy encounter for a different Open up a new action and select Aura, the heal-all
dynamic, allowing me to craft two enemies with different skill that we made earlier for our Priestess.
purposes to play off of each other.
Give it a high rating and select Conditions HP
Let’s look at them one at a time: between 0~25%.
Morris is a cultish fanatic with a knife. He looks and
sounds like a caster type, and I’m going to run with that This keeps it from being used when his HP is high,
idea. To keep it from being a slugging match where both while making him use it often when his HP is low.
sides just trade blows until one dies, I’ll give him a support
role.
He should be able to do damage on his own, but that
shouldn’t be his primary way of affecting the encounter. I
decide to draw from some of Winter’s moves, as I picture
him as having once belonged to the same organization as
she is.

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Planning the Boss Fight: Mechanics, Cont. Playtest! Playtest! Playtest!

Now onto the Cerberus. If Morris is a support enemy, Now its time to playtest. With this battle I playtested
Cerberus should be the damage dealer. with the characters at various levels, with various equipment
to see what the character could have done to better prepare.
The first thing I decide to do is give Cerberus a special I changed the stats for the enemies up and down, trying to
Feature that will allow him to go twice each round. find the perfect balance. Its very simiar to the work with
the Orcs, only taken with more care.
Combined with a high attack stat, this makes the
Cerberus dangerous on its own. But I decide to go a few Normally this is where I put an overview of what
steps further. I give him the Drain skill to use regularly we’ve went over, but instead I’m going to put a disclaimer.
when he is below 50% HP. I also build a custom skill for Encounter balance is time consuming. It takes a lot of
the Cerberus: Fire Breath. Because of his three heads, I dedicated playtesting, and lots and lots of practice. Never
change the target to 3 Random Targets. give up on it though.

Remember to set Cerberus and Morris’s MHP much Keep tweaking, keep trying one more small thing. If
higher than a standard encounter, but not to the point that there was one thing that you can do to improve your game
it gets boring. the most, this is it.

Next Tutorial Preview

Now that we’ve laid out most of the mechanics, in our
next tutorial, we are going to start connecting everything
together with story and events.

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Make Your Own Game Tutorial VIII: Events Part 1

Opening Thoughts

With this tutorial, I am going to be doing something
slightly different than I did with all the others. We will not
be opening our sample project during this tutorial, instead
we will focus entirely on theory and the basic commands
available to use.

In Events Part 2, we will then apply this theory to
our project, fleshing out, and leaving only polishing up the
sample game between us and being finished.

Events: What do they do? Simple Event made in Tutorial IV

Events are used for two major purposes in RPG But there is also a second, very important role for
Maker VX Ace. events is controlling game flow. For instance, how do you
determine where a character can and can’t go, how do you
The first is to provide objects for the player to interact open up new areas for him to explore.
with. This can be an NPC for the player to talk to, a switch
for them to pull, or even just something to move your All of this is done with events.
characters from map to map.

We’ve already made several simple events that fulfill
this purpose, such as the Merchant we made in the fourth
tutorial shown to the right.

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Make Your Own Game Tutorial VIII: Events Part 1

Approaching Event Design Creating the Treasure Chest

Event design is all logic. There are lots of tricks and The first thing to do when planning an event is to
tips you can pick up over time, but the best tool you will think, in plain speak: What does this event do?
ever have is your own brain. What I hope to teach in this
tutorial isn’t how to create a specific type of event, its how With a treasure chest, this is a pretty simple thing to
to walk yourself through ANY event. describe: Player opens it, gets an item. The item given with
this one is a cloth shirt.
To start with, we are going to be designing the treasure
chest we created in Tutorial IV, except this time, we are To illustrate event flow I’m going to be drawing each
going to do it from scratch, and we are going to go step step as a flowchart.
through step of the logic it takes to create it.
I encourage everyone to use
flowcharts in their event design,
as it will give you an excellent idea
of how to organize your events.

To the right is the simple
plain text explanation of what
our event does. The event starts,
it gives a cloth shirt to the player,
and then it ends.

Do you see the problem
with this flowchart?

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Make Your Own Game Tutorial VIII: Events Part 1

Creating the Treasure Chest (Cont.) Flow Charts!

That’s right! Every time the player activates this event Flowcharts are an excellent resource to use to
it would give him another shirt. Infinite shirts would be actuallize events. A lot of the ways I am using them are the
useful, but would break the game. The player could sell same as how programmers are taught to begin thinking
them for infinite money! of programming. There are many flowchart shapes, but
I am only using the three listed below combined with
So we need to add a branch near the beginning of arrows.
the event that checks if the chest has already been looted.
Let’s not worry about how this is one in the editor quite
yet, instead, in plain language, lets put the branch into our
flowchart.

http://www.rpgmakerweb.com/ You can find info on many more shapes if you are
interested by searching the internet.

Also, all of the flowcharts made in this tutorial
were made with the freeware program yEd.

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Make Your Own Game Tutorial VIII: Events Part 1

Creating the Treasure Chest (Cont.) We are nearing the end of our plain text version of
our event. Right now, it will perform the game mechanics
This flowchart works perfectly for us, because we portion of what we want it to do, but it doesn’t actually
remember that it was looted already. But a computer doesn’t visually do anything on the screen.
know to remember this unless we tell it to remember it.
What we need to do is add in the sound effects,
Once again, we won’t worry about how this is done in treasure chest opening animations, and a message to the
the editor. All we need to know right now is that it has to be player that he received something. All of this, of course,
told to store the information about whether it was looted. needs to be stuck in the “No” branch.
Its easiest just to fill this in as the last thing the branch on
the “No” side does before ending the event. You can see this
version of the flowchart below.

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Make Your Own Game Tutorial VIII: Events Part 1

Quiz! 1. Recreate the Dragon Quest I “But Though Must” scene:
The Princess asks to join you, if you say no, she says “But
As you can see, plain description and flowcharts can Thou Must” then asks you again. This will happen as long
put you in a good position to start plotting out your events as you continue to say no. If you say Yes, she joins the party.
in the editor. (Remember that the Princess shouldn’t be able to join
twice!) Answer Page 6
Here, because the main purpose of this tutorial is to 2. Using the treasure chest flow chart we created as a base,
teach process rather than how to do a specific thing, I’m create a flow chart for a treasure chest that will only open at
going to do something a little different and give a little quiz. the cost of 3 Lightning Gems from your inventory, that will
Don’t worry, its not going to be graded! give the character a Lightning Blade. Answer Page 6
3. Create an event that allows you to do one of the following
On this page, I will describe several event scenarios two trades: 2 Steel Bars for a Katana or 1 Yarn for a Magic
and ask you to draw your own flowchart (either by hand or Sock. Make sure to have it give “not enough” messages and
on a computer) to show how that would be accomplished. the option to loop around to the beginning after you are
done. (Note: These items are not used in our game, they are
Once again, knowing the exact commands is not entirely hypothetical) Answer Page 7
important. What is important is understanding the logic of 4. Create an event where you can ask an old man a question.
how the program runs through events. Use plain English, He answers 4 times, then refuses to answer the same question
and don’t get hung up on whether I write things slightly again, telling you to leave him alone. Answer Page 8
different. The main point is to see how well your flowcharts
match mine, and if they don’t, if it would still accomplish
the same thing.

The following pages will show the answers to these
scenario.

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Make Your Own Game Tutorial VIII: Events Part 1

Quiz! Answers 2.

1.

The important thing here is to make sure that we loop First things first, we need to add an additional branch
back ot the initial question every single time the player says to check whether the player has enough Gems. This needs
no. to be after the check to see if you’ve already looted the chest.

You have two options on preventing it from happening Additional additions are the inclusion of taking 3
again. The first is what I used, just check if the Princess is in lightning gems from the player (otherwise it isn’t a cost),
the party. This doesn’t work if she is removed later though! and a message giving a hint to the player of how to open
So another option would have been to Store the info that the chest. You could also add in a SFX that plays when you
the event didn’t need to happen again. try to open the locked chest if you so choose.

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