WHAT IS THE PERFECT ENCOUNTER RATE?

That point's already come up earlier in the thread. As much as people like to think random encounters are "forced", it's really a lot more situational than that. It's not that hard to make random encounters a more flexible encounter type for the playeers, and it's plenty easy to have touch encounters be more forceful and flow-breaking for the players.

Then again, if someone doesn't enjoy your battle system, then they shouldn't be playing the game regardless of whether it's random or touch.

author=slashphoenix

author=bulmabriefs144
Not necessarily that one is "wrong" and the other is "right" (overly simplistic), but that it is important to manage these correctly.

this.


Thinking about it now, making encounters random and invisible did a lot for the original Pokemon game. By avoiding grass, you had a limited amount of control over how many encounters you fought. There was the tension of stepping into a patch of grass to get an item a few steps in - will I fight a wild pokemon? Will I survive it?

In addition, I believe one of the main attractions of the original Pokemon games was their sense of mystery. After wandering through Viridian Forest for forever fighting Weedles and Kakunas, imagine the shock when you hear the battle sound, the screen goes black, and a Pikachu appears. As a kid, that kind of stuff blew my freaking mind. A simplistic conversion to conventional touch encounters would've obliterated that feeling of suspense, especially if you can see that there's an obvious Pikachu sprite among all the Caterpies.

Maybe there's a way to make touch encounters in Pokemon while maintaining suspense, but I'm having a hard time thinking of one that wouldn't have involved massive redesign of the mechanics and maps, as well as changing away from tile-based movement. And what would it have accomplished? Random battles work extremely well in Pokemon.

Personally, though, I think it could've been handled better by making it semi-random. You have a think clump of bushes that moves around. You have to press the action button to search through it which afterward erases the bush (possibly cutting it in the process unless it's thick grass, which them needs an HM or whatever). You either get "It was the wind..." (60%), "Searching through the grass, you found..." (treasure usually in the form of herbs/nuts/berries, 10%), "A wild pokemon appeared!" (29%), "A rare pokemon appeared!" (1%).

Which brings actually a third category: touch, random, and action. This would also be the case for challenging random townsfolk (or having them decide they don't like you because you've talked to them too much).

author=LockeZ
I don't buy the "give players the option to skip anything they want" method of game design. It reeks of bad game design to me. Your job is to make the player not want to skip it.

Well, you should be able to skip some things you don't like. Let's put it this way, waves and waves of random encounters is a bad idea (unless it works because an army is sending them). Poor AI monsters that you can dodge easily is also a bad idea because it means you have a battle system that hangs together like a loose tapestry. So, either improve one (alter encounter rate due to various conditions, or improve the AI to either using pathfinder or insert random movement in addition to follow hero as a custom so that if it runs into an obstacle it tries to get around it by moving in some other direction), or have a mix. Also, I thought the Forever's End with its idea of rewarding for clearing the map.

Someone mentioned Chrono Trigger. It should be noted that Chrono Trigger is actually not fully touch based. Or rather, there are also tiles you can touch, that cause enemies to fly in, to say nothing of stupid actions (like releasing monsters into a screen by pushing the wrong switch).

The major nuisance of touch encounters in 2k3 at least is that random encounters has a special gameover condition built in, whereas touch... don't. Here you've spent time making it all work, but the game gives you only two options for touch: gameover and condition. Of course, you could simply add it in as a common event, but the fact of the matter is, if you've already made 50 Earthbound style touch monsters (quick tutorial: make thisX/Y and heroX/Y on touch, then check facing and X/Y and give first strike or initiative to the member who was facing correctly. It involves about 12 different encounter codes though) going back over them after finding this out is a pain.

I'm 30 btw.

I concur with halibabica.