DFALCON'S PROFILE

author=Muninn
Half-hour random encounters might alienate the player, but nobody wants to be dragged away from the map for an encounter that's going to be finished in less than 2 rounds of battle (aside from early-game training battles, I suppose).

I think in this case you want to be looking more at how you can improve the UI and process of dragging someone away from the map, than blaming the battle.

Look at easy battles in Chrono Trigger. Many of these are not especially interesting in any mechanical way. But they're fast - it's not a matter of "wait for screen transition, navigate a menu to start, everybody's ATB starts at 0 and counts up, alternately take turn and wait". Instead, the characters jump to their spots, within a couple seconds you're attacking, and within a few more your enemies are dead. Insofar as you have battles that require minimal effort, I think keeping them fast is pretty useful.

Megaman Battle Network is another game (well, series) that does a good job with this. (As well as hitting one of my other difficulty-related buttons, better rewards for better performance, which gives some motivation even to people who are starting to find the battle easy.)

If, say, you want circular motion but your intended number of frames doesn't divide nicely into the given lookup table's, there's an easy approximation trick to get circular motion or construct your own lookup table.

Because d/dx(cos x) = -sin x and d/dx(sin x) = cos x, each frame you can basically just have:

y += x/c
x -= y/c

for some constant c not too large relative to the range of x and y; in something like RM2K(3) this might require keeping, say, x*256 and y*256 and using those in the calculation then dividing down.

The above has a period of basically 2*pi*c iterations, though there can be a touch of rounding error.

Ellipses you can do with:
y += x/a
x -= y/b
(this gets you a period of 2*pi*sqrt(a*b) and a y-axis length of (x-axis length)*sqrt(b/a) IIRC.)

Not sure if the lookup table in the article was constructed like this or some other way, I don't have RM2K3 on this computer.

#3 so hard.

"Don't waste the player's time" is an essential point we come back to a lot in the community. (One that bears repeating. Listen to the RMNcasts where they talk about slow walk speed or text speed - makers just have blinders on about these things sometimes.)

As far as Tabris's comment, I am not generally in favor of making RPG battles easier, but that seems to have very little to do with this discussion. Part of many RPGs is that your stats matter, and it's possible to say something like "right now there is no way I can beat this boss" or "right now I can beat this boss only if Boss Skill X misses in the first round, which has about a 15% chance of happening, which isn't worth trying with the 30-minute trek from the last save point." It's not like you can beat Final Fantasy (I) at level 1. Needing to grind in a game like that doesn't make it any harder, it just means the player's solution takes longer to implement.

I would warn people to be especially careful if considering scaling treasures.

The Chrono Trigger example works because it's repeatable: you can get every level of the reward. If you don't have some regulatory mechanism, a scaling treasure can easily generate perverse incentive, e.g., for players to not do the task because they don't really need the reward yet and don't want to miss out on the better, later version. If it's something important or unique and they didn't know ahead of time, they might even get irritated that they got locked into a sub-optimal version. (This was a problem with vanilla Oblivion, for example.)