Tag Archives: outside the box

Thinking Outside the Box: Challenge 2

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So, last time we cheated the autotile system to give us tile and a half high walls. Are you ready for the second challenge?

Challenge 2 FIGHT!

For this challenge I’m going to give you an enemy, two skills, and a modified state to use.

The enemy!

The skills!

This skill targets 3 random enemies and induces deep sleep 75% of the time on each enemy.

This skill drains hp from all enemies equal to the casters magic attack * 4 – the targets magic defense * 2, but ONLY works if the target is affected by the state Deep Sleep (make sure the number in bstate?(*) is the same as Deep Sleep’s state number in the database). Otherwise it does 0 damage. This uses a custom damage formula based on Fomar’s excellent custom damage formula tutorial to accomplish this.

And this is the State:

Deep Sleep is identical to sleep with the exception that it is only removed by damage 50% of the time.

Ok, now that we have all the materials… what is the challenge?!

Description: You have these skills, but you will notice I didn’t show you the Action Patterns of the Shades. Your job is this: Create a troop containing 2 shades. Now make it so that when all the player characters are awake, the shades will ONLY use Sleep Breath, BUT if at least one of the player characters is under the influence of Deep Sleep, the shades will use Sleep Breath and Dream Feed equally.

Restrictions: No scripting.

You can use the comments here, or comment on the link from our Facebook page to offer up solutions. GOOD LUCK!

Thinking Outside the Box: Solution 1

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Congratulations to everyone who discovered a way to mimic what I did!

There were quite a few creative solutions, and one person even hit on the exact solution I used (curse you Liberty!).

So lets look at how I did it:

All I did, was take the wall autotile, and continue it up into the ceiling autotile. Here is a screenshot showing how it was done:

Notice how the wall autotile for the grey brick extends up higher into the wall top autotile above it. This let my place the wall top on top which would be half wall top, half wall. You can even see that I forgot to darken the edges, which created what looked like a shift click error in my image last week.

How do we use this?

Now, when thinking outside the box, there is one other thing you have to keep in mind: What are the repercussions of handling it this way. There are two big ones for my method:

  1. It doesn’t work well if they don’t tile again every 16 pixels. It helped that the blocks fit perfectly to just go up 16 pixels more with it.
  2. It requires you to use the same ceiling and wall together whenever you use that tileset.

Now that we have identified the repercussions, we have to decide whether its something we can work with. In this case I decide both are acceptable compromises.

With 1. I just have to do some editing if I want to use an autotile that doesn’t tile perfectly every 16 pixels. Its more annoying, but not impossible. It just requires more work.

With 2. I don’t see this as that big of an issue. You have way more room in the wall section of the tilesets than you can use in any one map, and if I REALLY went over the needed space there for the whole game, I can make another tileset.

Stay tuned for the next challenge! Did you learn anything from this one? Share with us in the comments below.

Thinking Outside the Box: Challenge 1

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So what do you think the most important skill is to making a game with RPG Maker?

If you read the title of the blog post (how did you get here if you didn’t) you can guess what I think it is: The ability to think outside the box. There are lots of ways to think outside the box: You can think of a way to tell a story that isn’t the norm or a gameplay mechanic in a way that it wasn’t originally intended, but in these challenges, what I want you to focus on is accomplishing things in the maker by using the structure of the program in unconventional ways.

Every so often, I’m going to put up a Challenge. The challenge will be issued in the form of a series of screenshots or a video with a description plus a list of restrictions to keep you from taking the easy way.

You can play by leaving a comment on the blog post with an explanation of how to theoretically accomplish the exact same  After a week is up, I’ll make another blog post, congratulating anyone who figured out a way to copy the screenshot, while doing a detailed explanation of how I accomplished the task. There really isn’t a prize for accomplishing it, other than stretching your brain and learning more about the program. And you know, the ability to rub it in other people’s face, which is always fun.

So, now that I’ve explained the game, let’s begin:

Challenge 1: FIGHT

Description: Look at the wall heights and thickness. Tile and a half high walls! half tile thickness! What sorcery is this?!

Restrictions: No parallax mapping. Everything is done with tiles alone.

Good luck!