WHATCHU WORKIN' ON? TELL US!

How fast should my characters level up? How much more EXP should enemies give relative to their difficulty? How do you measure their difficulty? That sort of thing.

author=Merlandese
I'm currently working on a game that has a schedule system a lot like Harvest Moon or Majora's Mask, where NPCs have movement based on the time. This is proving to be the hardest part of making the game, and a lot of interesting design choices come from it.

What are you making it in?

What the hell? I'm testing my game and I just beat a challenging boss battle and I got a "division by zero" error right as he died. Has anyone ever seen this? I've beaten this boss a countless number of times in numerous playthroughs and I've never seen this before. I'd really rather this not happen to someone else as they play the game.

My hypothesis as to why this happened is this: The enemy was reduced to exactly zero hp, just by chance. Obviously, it's probably far more common for an enemy to be reduced to a negative number before his death is initiated. As this happened and the enemy died, another one of my characters attacked in-between the monster dying and the battle ending. This caused the engine to input the attack formula which, in turn, forced an attempt to divide by zero. If this hypothesis is correct, then hopefully this error is extremely rare and will never happen again.

I'm using RPG Maker 2003. I just thought you guys might either find this humourous or be able to offer some insight as to what happened and how to prevent it.

Working on setting up all the events for a single battle with a malicious flower. It's a little time consuming!

author=Ramshackin
I don't know anything about Construct 2, but let me know if you need help putting your system together.

I'm having a lot of design complications with mine, the main one being that even when I get certain aspects of the schedule to work I still haven't properly developed a system that I can easily use to manage the schedules. So if I decide a character should be ten minutes late I have to reprogram five minutes worth of stuff. No bueno.

We're not in the same engine but I would like to pick your brain about a problem you may have encountered.

Let's say you have a Salesman enter town at 10:00 sharp. If you are standing by the entrance of the map, you will see him walk in and head to whatever "waypoint" you have designated. Let's say that the Salesman needs to be by the basketball court at 10:10, so he walks and it takes roughly ten in-game minutes.

Now, at 10:00, when the Salesman appears, you walk out of the map and then walk in. In the time that it took you it is now 10:01. From everything I know so far four things can have happened to the Salesman:

01. He is properly en route and is 1/10th the way to his destination.
02. It is not time for him to be at the destination, and the time to trigger his appearance has passed, so he won't exist until 10:10.
03. It is not time for him to be at the destination so it replays his entrance, now with a minute lag.
04. The chance to see him arrive has passed so he is already at his destination.

Obviously Option 01 is the ideal. If that's what you did, I'd like to know how. Currently I just went from Option 03 to a complicated Option 01. My version of Option 01 works but right now is so convoluted I wouldn't dare keep using it for every instance of every character.

Did you encounter this problem and what'd you do about it?

Working on a "natural" way to guarantee that rock-pushing mechanics are not going to lead to permanently trapped players. A "reset" function doesn't count, since that's artificial.

Giving the player a warp spell to escape from the current dungeon seems natural-feeling enough. It doesn't specifically draw attention to the rock-pushing problem since it's also in a variety of other situations, and the player's first thought when learning it will be that it's probably mostly for when you're out of MP and need healing.

Zelda handles it by just letting the player pull almost anything they can push. In the rare situations where blocks are only pushable, they're carefully arranged in very simple puzzles of maybe 3-5 blocks at most, so that it's impossible to get stuck.

Wild ARMs gives the player a ton of puzzle-solving tools similar to how Zelda does, such as bombs and grappling hooks and fire rods. One of the tools is a Stopwatch which rewinds time in the current room. Because it's integrated into the tool system it doesn't feel out of place. (Zelda actually has a warp-escape tool in almost every game too, but you never ever use it for that.)

Probably the best solution is to not have so many block puzzles in your RPG since everyone seems to hate them and they've been absoltely driven into the ground.

Let me know how you do it! It can be tedious to choose between pull or push every time the player interacts with a rock, and I wasn't sure about adding an extra button whose only functionality was to pull rocks.

As I recall the crest graph system of the Wild Arms series, a spell is a combination of two elements. Though, it sounds like you want characters to have two spells according to what combination of catalysts they have equipped? I'm not quite sure about this point, though.

What I do know is that, given that you want a script-free system, that strongly suggests to me use of Common Events and Conditional Branches. I'm kinda thinking that a script that activates after (during?) equipping catalysts might be more efficient, but, that's just me thinking out loud.

*Edit: Actually, why not just put the associated spells on the catalysts themselves? Characters equip catalysts, right? I mean, you might need to mess with how equipment works, or what equipment can go where, but, it's a thought. Maybe I'm over-simplifying what you're trying to do, though.