New week, new VX Ace Make Your Own Game Tutorial. This week we focus on creating characters. Once again, the tutorial is much too large to hold in a blog post, so we will be providing just a preview here. For the full version, right-click save as the full PDF tutorial HERE.
What Makes a Character?
A character is obviously any person who is represented in the story of your RPG.
There are two categories of characters in an RPG: Playable Characters (PCs) and Non-Playable Characters (NPCs). This tutorial is going to focus on Playable Characters.
What is it that makes a Playable Character? Playable characters are not just a personality and force of the narrative in an RPG, they also have statistics to allow the player to overcome challenges in the gameplay.
In order to create a PC we are going to take our first foray into the Database. Quite a few parts of the database are dedicated to creating PCs, and throughout this tutorial we will be editing things in the following tabs:
As you can see, characters have a large number of components that make up what they are and what they can do. Weapons and Armors are also part of creating characters, but will be covered in the next tutorial.
Before we get to designing characters, lets go over the default stats and resources available to a character.
Character Stats and Resources
While more can be added through scripting, I will be going over the major Stats and Resources that each character possesses. Stats are static numbers used in equations to determine outcomes of actions, Resources are numbers that can be spent, lost, grow, and be regained over the course of a battle.
There are three major resources in RMVX Ace:
HP (Hit Points): HP is the amount of damage a character can take before dying. When you attack you attack or are attacked, damage is usually done to this resource. Maximum HP (MHP), is a stat that is specific to each specific character depending on how much damage he/she can take.
MP (Magic Points): MP is spent to use skills, usually magic, hence the name. Maximum MP (MMP), is also a stat.
TP (Tech Points): TP is spent to use skills. TP behaves differently than HP and MP in that the max TP of every character is 100. You gain TP over each turn based on what has occured that turn.
There are six major stats in RMVX Ace. Of these, 4 are only used in damage formulas (Attack, Defense, Magic Attack, and Magic Defense), and are therefore useable in any way you would like. I will cover their default use here.
Attack: Attack represents the amount of damage done by physical attacks, such as hitting people with a weapon. Weapons generally also boost this stat.
Defense: Defense is generally used to lower the amount of damage you take from physical attacks. Armor generally boosts this stat.
Magic Attack: This stat is used to determine the amount of damage done by magical attacks.
Magic Defense: This stat is used to lower the amount of damage you take from magical attacks.
Agility: This stat determines turn order during combat.
Luck: This stat is used in calculating chances of taking/giving a status effect or buff/debuff.
Remember that all of these resources and stats can be renamed.
There are also 4 more minor character stats that we will use in the next tutorial.
HIT (Hit Rate): Determines the chance of an attack hitting.
EVA (Evasion): Determines the chance of avoiding an attack.
TGR (Target Rate): Chance of being targetted by an attack.
CRI (Critical Rate): Chance of a critical hit being scored.
So what does this mean for your game? An important part of creating the game is creating consistent gameplay mechanics.
Without consistency, players can make mistakes in customizing characters. For instance if you had a weapon skill that did damage based on Magic Attack in a game where it is normally based on Attack, a player might be boosting his Attack to do damage with it and gaining nothing.
You also need to be consistent with resources, making similar types of skills always consume the same type of resource. This makes the game seem more cohesive as a whole.
For consistency, I’m going to lay out some ground rules for my example game.
1. Weapon Skills always consume TP and use Attack to do damage, and Defense to prevent damage.
2. Magic Skills always consume MP and use Magic Attack to do damage, and Magic Defense to prevent damage.
Intrigued? Head over to the our RPG Maker VX Ace Tutorial section to get the full version of this and other in depth beginner tutorials!
Questions? Suggestions? Don’t hesitate to leave us a word in the comments section below.