The one thing that made everyone crazy and rabid back in the days of RPG Maker 2000/3 were any game featuring custom battle systems (abbreviated as CBS). You may also noticed that myself and others have enrolled in the My Own Game: Creation event. These two things are related because we can't possibly be using a default battle system in RPG 20XX because there isn't one yet.

So how are we making a CBS?

Before there can be default battle systems in RPG 20XX, there needs to be a framework for this sort of thing. The whole attributes and derived statistics thing has been implemented quite some time ago and lets you customize all the numbers to your liking. There are also commands that modify players, and the animation effect editor was recently added. These are all pretty basic things you would need, but there are still some things missing.

After much thinking, I've decided to add two new command categories in the next release. The first one will be draw commands that let you make your own custom menus that do or don't use the currently set system graphic theme. This can also be handy as a HUD display. The second one will be battle commands to handle combat. You could nickname these CBS commands.

These battle commands will let you create battlers (enemy instances) that could get assigned to events on the map. Battlers can be used in lieu of players with those (source) and (target) player targets you've seen in the commands before. You'll be able to modify the (source) and (target) pointers to either point to a player (which belongs on the user's team) or an event holding a battler (an enemy). Because everything ever done can be a skill, even if its not a combat action, you only need a command that uses a skill on someone or something.

Therefore, you can have an event on the map initialize itself by creating a battler. Then, you can attack it by setting the (source) as the character attacking, the (target) as the battler and then execute the skill with (source) and (target) as parameters. The pointers to the events on the map are automatically set for you, so when the skill is executed it will show the battle animations properly and numbers will even pop out like it were combat.

This is much simpler than doing a CBS in RPG Maker 2003, but still more complex than using a default battle system. Implementing these two new classes of commands and having them used and tested heavily will provide a nice platform for later implementing default battle systems.

Later when pixel movement is implemented, this will make even an action CBS a snap. The CBS/drawing commands will have their debut along with our submission for the My Own Game: Creation event.