Feel free to suggest features here.
Plugin that allows you to add "grid" battle mechanics to your RPG Maker MV project · By
I haven't tested it yet but I think we should be able to display custom "tile sprites".
Right now we do have tile sprites, if you think about how the highlighting is displayed, it's just a square. I change the opacity and the color as needed.
So if we added like a "burning sprite" to the tile, maybe it'll achieve that burning effect.
I think a state would probably work. For example, you cast a fire spell on an empty tile and it adds a burn state.
And anyone that walks into it might automatically gain the burn state.
You could then have the sprite reflect the state that's applied. Not sure what happens if there's multiple states but probably something that devs would figure out for their game.
I also really like this idea of being able to dynamically change the terrain state of a tile. In terms of multiple states, I think if there's some way to designate a "priority" number of each state, then the highest priority state could always takes over. Or even better, if you allow some kind of note-syntax or similar that allows someone to assign an "end result" state based on combinations of other states ("fire" + "ice" = "water"). It'd be nice if there was some built in support for making those a + b = c or a + c + d = w kinds of assignments.
There should be an option to have characters face diagonally because battle sprites tend to look better at these angles. I think it looks good even though the grid is orthogonal rather than isometric. This is how Live A Live handled it and I thought it was interesting. Personally I think diagonal strafing in all 4 directions looks a lot less awkward than making 90-degree turns and walking in straight lines like in FFT, and it would look pretty stylish in a game with more sprite animation than Live A Live.
http://zsnsk.sakura.ne.jp/livealive/battle_system.html#rear-or-side-atk
1. Hierarchical highlight colors make sense. Right now I pretty much just hardcoded some colors (0xFF0000 for "tile with battler", 0xFFFF00 for "empty tile", and "0xFFFFFF" for no highlight. Alpha is different as well.
2. For the attack range "only on enemy grid" in a 2 grid system, what would it be like? For example if my character is standing in the front row on their own grid, and they wanted to use a melee attack that has range 1, would it only highlight one tile on the enemy side? Maybe the entire row? The concept of range has been kind of confusing to me for 2-grid system. In a 1-grid system it's pretty straightforward, but I'll need more ideas for how people want to use range for 2-grid (or multiple grid) systems
3. For custom points I'd probably leave it until later. Maybe just try to integrate it with an existing one (I assume one already exists...?)
4. What's interesting is the "any number of movements per turn". For example in most tactics games, you can "move" and "attack" in one turn. In some games, once you attack, you can't move, but there are other games where you can attack, and then also move if you haven't moved yet. And yet even more games, where you can move 2 steps (out of 4), perform an attack, and then move the remaining 2 steps to do a hit-and-run. Of course, this was reserved for certain types of characters like knights where it might make sense for them to be able to "attack while moving"
This reminds me of chrono cross system where everyone gets up to 7 points of "stamina" and each action takes up a certain number of stamina, and when they have no more stamina (or negative stamina), their turn is up until they recover some.
5. For switching places with enemy, we could probably do it like this (using the new movement formulas)
var posUser = a.getPosition();
var posTarget = b.getPosition();
b.moveTo(posUser)
a.moveTo(posTarget)
I'll have to try it out but the logic should make sense.
6. For lift and throw, we would basically want to be able to select two targets manually. I'm thinking of a solution where you could literally "Pick N targets", so let's say you wanted to create a teleport skill, you'd pick an actor first, and then you'd pick another space. Or that lift-and-throw skill, where you pick an actor to pick up, and then another space (which may or may not be empty) to throw to. I have an idea for this.
7. For bombs that trigger when someone moves on to it, having a general "trigger condition" would be useful to have.
8. Invisible state I'm not too sure how that might be implemented.
9. For aura states, we can probably try something like "at the end of action, check if anyone around the battler should have a new state added to them". This way the aura is applied immediately after you move next to someone. We might also need to check if an aura-inherited state should be removed at the end of action, in case that person then moves away.
10. Range modifiers will function similar to traits: you can have actor range modifier, class range modifier, state range modifier, equip range modifier, etc. Having another trait that will nullify range modifier effects might also be useful to have.
11. I had also thought of some sort of mind control skill like charm. Actually putting them on the ally grid might need some thinking though. What if there's no space?
12. There will be a bunch of different ways to specify AOE, depending on what you need. Since there are so many different types of possible AOE, some options might be less suitable (eg: whole row/ whole column needs a math formula instead of direct tile designation)
13. AoE is mostly tied to scope. For a two grid system, "opponent" AOE would target the other grid, while "ally" AOE would target the user's grid. Having a "four corners" skill can just be some generic "opponent" scope with a custom AOE that specifies "four corners" or something. I'll have to think if we can use "all enemies" for this.
14. Reviving dead battlers at their position is probably built-in since battlers normally aren't removed from the battlefield and will remain at their location. Not sure what you mean by "emplacement of the resurrection skill" though. Like re-positioning the target to a particular tile?
15. PvP over online, actually that's one of my goals. But for the simple case, you'll probably just add "helpers" from other players/friends to assist you in battle. It's mostly a one-player game with social elements. Multiplayer has additional complexities that will need to be addressed.
There's a request to make it so that in a two grid system, you can't target enemies "in the back" using melee weapons until the enemies "in the front" have been eliminated.
This sounds like a skill range thing but actually not really, because when the enemies in the front have been defeated, the melee attacks can suddenly reach the back. Perhaps this is a line-of-sight problem?
So for example, if someone's in front of you, it will block the enemies in the back. But in this case, "in front" involves checking an entire column instead of just the single tile in front of you.
It would be nice if this logic can be used even for the "basic" grid system, so that you must always target enemies in front.
Will be approaching this problem with a different solution.
Instead of having the chicken in the front "block" people in the back, we simply ask the chickens in the back if there's anyone "in front".
For a simple 2-grid setup like above, this is very simple: we just need to check if any enemies columns > target column.
However, the problem in general is we ASSUME what "front" and "back" means. Direction matters.
For simplicity, I will be adding a direction to the grid, so that the left grid is
3 2 1
While the right grid is
1 2 3
I'm not sure if this should affect tile designation though. For example, (1, 1) is normally in the top-left corner, but if we were to "flip" the grid horizontally, does that means (1, 1) is now the top-right corner?
Something to consider. But let's think about more than just two grids. What if there are three grids? What if they are facing up and down? Perhaps it would be better to define "front" with respect to the direction of each battler?
We can ignore flipping the grids around if we have a way to determine the "position" of each grid.
__ G4 __ G1 G2 G3 __ G5 __
Consider this grid layout. If you only consider G1 and G2 (which is our two grid layout), G1 is "left" of G2. Which means if a chicken is standing on G1, then the "front" most column is on the right, while the "backmost" column is on the left.
On the other hand, if the chicken was standing on G3, then the "front" most column is on the left, and the back most columns is on the right
We don't consider the diagonal cases for now, but I think this approach should be suitable for even 4-sided attacks shown above.
Actually with this grid approach, we can basically implement skill ranges for multi-grid setups.
You would just need a way to "connect" grids together, and then we'll know "distance" between different tiles on different grids.
For example, the right-most tile on G1 will be one tile away from the left-most tile on G2.
Oh, also I was looking for tabletop rpg fantasy maps and I found something that MIGHT give you an idea for you grid system on this store page :
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/256706/City-Modular-MapTiles-COTBS
Near the middle of the page, there is an animation of a modular arena, on twitter you said something about shrinking arena so that might be interesting!
I'll put together a battle summons plugin at some point. There will be three types of summons
1. actors - that you can control
2. enemies - that you must defeat
3. NPC battlers - basically anything else that might interact with battlers. Maybe some boulder in the middle of the road, or a tower that does AOE fire attack around it every turn so you should try to avoid it.
For the targeting rules, I'm planning to go with maybe a line-of-sight implementation, and then you could say
1. someone covers an entire column, which means you have to clear everything in one column first before you can make your way towards other columns. Maybe a tank that blocks all 4 rows.
2. they only cover their row, so maybe two have two tanks that each block 2 rows, and if you defeat one tank, you could then target the ones that are now exposed.
It will use the same concept as AOE region painting, and probably use the same shapes so you could basically re-use those AOE shapes for other purposes.
