Sep 30 2018 OctoPack Battler Big Update 3

Our friend, Fallen Angel Olivia, has a new update to her OctoPack Battler Sample Project!

Some more content has been added into the sample project and OctoPack Battler today!

An update has been made to Order Turn Battle. I’ve received some reports of certain Yanfly’s Buffs & States Core Lunatic Mode codes failing to work properly with Order Turn Battle. I don’t know why this happens, but I suspect it has to do with turn order calculation. This comes as a big surprise to me because I use a lot of Lunatic Mode notetags inside the sample project, too, and they have been working fine as far as I can tell. But since I cannot know how every single user is placing their notetags inside their projects, I have made a fail safe to organize it properly to prevent future problems with it.

That is the only major change I have done to the plugin code itself. Now, I will explain the new content added to the sample project!

The Trickster is the newest class I’ve added to the sample project. It has 8 new skills added to it!

This is Yanfly’s Jump Tips & Tricks added into the sample project to show it does indeed work with OTB despite what many people claim otherwise. This skill makes the user jump into the air for 2 turns, becoming untargetable. After 2 turns is up, the user falls down from the sky and lands on the selected enemy, dealing critical damage to it.

The Trickster is a class that brings in a lot of mechanics from the Persona series by using Yanfly’s Lunatic Mode alone! It can give an ally a state that makes a special effect: if the ally hits an enemy’s weakness, that ally will gain an extra action immediately after, as long as the enemy’s weakness hasn’t been exploited already during that turn.

There is a hidden passive effect, too: if all enemies become stunned by having their Break Shields reach 0, the Trickster will ask you if you want to do an All-Out Attack, which brings in the total ATK power of the party to deal damage to the enemy.

If you want to add the Trickster to your party, you can find him in the bar in the sample project!

This is a pretty unique class! It also shows the type of potential gameplay that can happen with different mechanics added to it like Persona’s 1-More system and All-Out Attack. Please take your time exploring the the new features!

You can check out the article here!

Battle System STB Bug Fix Update and Comparing Battle Systems

YEP.130 - Battle System - STB

It’s been brought to my attention multiple times across the past few months that there’s been bugs with STB and forced actions. This has been finally fixed as of today’s update. Or rather, it’s been fixed for about a week ago, but has been in testing throughout the week before I decided to make it official. This is mostly thanks to Olivia asking me various questions in the making of her OTB battle system, which made me go back to reference STB on where to go for her as the two systems are very similar. Not only are forced actions fixed but so are instant casts for enemies, too. This, too, is also thanks to my interactions with Olivia once again.

You can get the updated and fixed version of the STB plugin here.

That said, I can imagine many of you have questions in regards to this update. Three of which, I can picture already so I’ll go ahead and answer them.

1. Does this mean you will continue to support STB once again?

I won’t say it will leave the discontinued status, but rather, it will be subject to bug fixes when the opportunity arises. After all, the three points made in this post remain true even in the current situation. The recent update to STB is what I consider to be an exception to the rule, if only to tie up loose ends.

2. Will you add in Action Times+ to STB?

Short answer: no. Long answer: It’s not something that fits in the scheme of STB due to the constant reliance and cyclical calculation of the AGI stat to determine the turn order (as that is an integral part of what makes STB work). The other reason is that the update to STB is mostly to tie up loose ends, as answered by the previous question, not an update to continue support and eventually add more features to it. However, if Action Times+ is a big part of your battle system and you would like for it to play a big role, STB would need to drop off the AGI stat’s influence on the turn order for it to be possible. When this happens, it actually becomes Olivia’s OTB battle system. I recommend you give that a try.

3. What is the difference between CTB, STB, and OTB?

This is a question I’ve seen asked often. And as it’s asked often, it’s better that it gets answered properly, as it is the responsibility of the game’s developer to understand each of the facets that govern his/her game’s mechanics.

CTB: Charge Turn Battle is a tick-based battle system. This means there are no such thing as a “battle turn” count. While “battle turns” are added in artificially through the plugin to just tie in the works of the Troop Event Condition, “battle turns” do not fundamentally play a role in determining the turn order of everything. In place of turn counts, “ticks” are used instead where a tick is a singular calculation that determines the proper positioning and relativity of each unit to each other in the grand scheme of calculating the turn order to determine which unit will have an action earlier or later. These “ticks” can be thought of as a clock ticking in seconds, only that the time in between battlers is removed and the time during a battler’s input is frozen. The said ticks will govern state “turns”, too, as they are automatically converted into ticks. In CTB, AGI is the king, the single most important stat in the whole game. A unit with a high enough AGI can potentially have multiple action turns before a unit with far lower AGI and will outlap the slower unit even after. With this in mind, CTB is the hardest to balance AGI out of the three mentioned battle systems thanks to “haste” and “slow” states being able to completely throw the battle system’s balance out the window.

STB: Part of the reason why CTB is so hard to balance properly is due to the fact that the editor is built completely around turn-based combat. STB makes a return to that from the tick-based STB back to turn-based. STB will also attempt to artificially balance the AGI stat by utilizing the rule of the “battle turn” imposed on by the battle system: Each unit is only allowed one turn by default regardless of their AGI value. Units with higher AGI values go earlier while units with lower AGI values go later. Because of this rule, AGI still has an immensely strong grasp on the battle system but not as strong as CTB did. AGI is constantly being calculated after each action to restructure the turn order in order to keep the balance and flow of the battle system. Exceptions can exist to this rule like Instant Casts, but Action Times+ aren’t as they are fundamentally different. In STB, those who stack AGI either before or during battle will often come out on top provided everything else is balanced. Maintaining “haste” on the player party and “slow” on the enemy troop is the key and core way of winning in nearly any game that uses STB and gives access to those play states/buffs.

OTB: Like STB, OTB is turn-based instead of being tick-based. However, it does a couple of interesting things.

  1. First, it maintains a mild dependence on AGI. Each unit’s AGI is only used for the calculation of the initial turn order when it’s being made and nothing else. Any changes to a unit’s AGI once the turn has started will not influence that unit’s position in the turn order, unlike STB. At least, not until the next time AGI is used for calculating the unit’s position in the turn order.
  2. The second thing of interest, however, is that instead of using one turn order to calculate the order of the units, it actually uses two: the current turn and the next turn. This means when turns are calculated, it actually does it for the next turn whenever a battle turn rolls over. This means the new “current turn” was the previous “next turn”. What makes this interesting is that this means that AGI changes not only do not affect the current turn nor the next turn, but instead, are effective only after the turn following the next turn. This makes changing AGI during battle seem nearly delayed, yet, that doesn’t actually happen… But why is that?
  3. That brings us to the third thing of interest: because OTB has a mild hold on AGI and thrives on utilizing two turn orders, it becomes the ideal candidate for a mechanic called Turn Order Manipulation. Having two turn orders (and visible) allows for the player to manipulate it calculatingly. And because AGI only affects the initial calculation of the order in the turns, the player does not have to worry about a sudden reversal due to a change in a unit’s AGI. Changes to the turn order through manipulation are there to stay unless further manipulated by other similar effects or when a new turn is to occur. This makes the manipulation only temporary and not lingering but still remains impactful.

So what does this say about OTB? Its mild AGI dependency, flexible turn order mechanics, and all around openness to turn order changes means that it’s actually NOT a battle system where the only way to combat AGI is to get better AGI (which is seen in the case of CTB and STB). And because of the all around openness in the battle system, things like Action Times+ can be utilized and included into it and flow just fine. So what anyone can conclude is that out of the three battle systems we’ve compared, OTB is the most AGI-balanced and flexible.

This isn’t to say OTB isn’t going to be without problems. In fact, making a battle system flawless is next to impossible. Not all plugins or the Tips & Tricks effects we’ve learned and made will be necessarily compatible with it. However, this isn’t the fault of OTB, but instead, the fault of RPG Maker MV’s original battle structure. A lot of the original battle structure throws a lot of chaos into making it structurally compatible with old and/or future plugins. Fortunately, by Olivia tying her OTB to the Battle Engine Core, a lot of potential plugin compatibility issues are fixed but not all.

Whew, typed a lot more than I expected to. While I am definitely in favor of OTB, I also recognize that for certain games out there, CTB or STB is better suited for them. For this reason alone, I made these small updates to STB to hopefully make the lives of some certain people a little easier.

Item Concoctions plugin for RPG Maker MV by Fallen Angel Olivia

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Our friend, Fallen Angel Olivia, brings us yet another plugin! Item Concoctions! This plugin basically gives you the “Mix” ability from Final Fantasy games!

This is a RPG Maker MV plugin that adds a “Concoct” command to any actor you want in battle. Concoct allows the actor to combine together two items to make a new item effect. Concoctions will be composed of a primary component, secondary component, and a resulting effect.

There is also an Item Concoction Preview Window that comes with this plugin. It can be enabled or disabled (up to you). It will display the resulting effect of the two mixed items together if the concoction combination has been made before. If it hasn’t, the effects will be hidden.

You can get it here or visit her itch.io page for other plugins made by her!

KemonoQ v 1.1 by Ækashics

Our friend, Ækashics, has revamped the old KemonoQ for some more awesome! 😀 Give the new demo a try!

KemonoQ is a dungeon crawler focused around equippable passive and powerful active effects. This is KemonoQ’s revamped demo, developed based on feedback we got back during its initial concept demo release. Since then a lot has changed, featuring rebalanced mechanics, improvements to the battle flow, new graphics and all around new content!

Download it today over at
https://aekashics.itch.io/kemonoq

===PixelDream===

Concept, Story & Art – Aekashics
Game Design, Mechanics & Implementation – Yanfly & Aekashics
Programming – Yanfly
Additional Programming – Liquidize
Music – LucStamrah
Production – Vistrom

Meta Controls by Fallen Angel Olivia

Our friend, Fallen Angel Olivia, has created another plugin again called Meta Controls! 😀

This is a RPG Maker MV plugin that lets you control switches and variables that last across a meta level on a game. A switch or variable designated to function as a meta switch or meta variable can persist across different save files. To assist in controlling meta properties of the game some more, the developer can assign common events to run at the start of a new game or when a game is loaded. Saving the game can also register map data to variables.

You can download it from itch.io!

What You Can Learn from Octopath’s Battle System – RPG Maker MV

Yanfly Engine Plugins is a plugin library made for RPG Maker MV, a wonderful piece of software to help you make that role playing game of your dreams. You can find out more about RPG Maker MV here.

Find the OctoPack Battler sample project here

You can find her other plugins here

Support Team Yanfly on Patreon

Octopath Traveler is praised often for its battle system. Everything about it just seems to fit together just right. Yet, you would be surprised to hear that it actually does nothing new, but instead, aims to make the whole battle experience more cohesive where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

OctoPack Battler – by Fallen Angel Olivia

Created by our Octopath-loving friend, Fallen Angel Olivia:

This is a sample project that contains a plugin with the 8x OctoPack Battler plugins compiled together and a pre-built setup to let you create a game to get the battle system running right out of the box. This sample project is heavily inspired by Octopath Traveler! You can use it to build your own game on top of it to have everything work properly! Otherwise, if you just want the compilation plugin itself, you can download that for free!

Find it here!

You can find her other plugins here!

YEP.170 – Event Spawner – RPG Maker MV

Yanfly Engine Plugins is a plugin library made for RPG Maker MV, a wonderful piece of software to help you make that role playing game of your dreams. You can find out more about RPG Maker MV here.

You can grab the plugin here:

English Mirror

Support Team Yanfly on Patreon

While in RPG Maker MV, there’s the ability to make events hidden and reveal themselves to make it look like they’ve spawned out of nothing. However, there isn’t an innate function to actually spawn an event from nothing. This plugin will provide users the ability to actually spawn an event that is premade and ready from another map(s).

A spawned event will contain all the data from its original source, from the event’s page conditions to the event commands to the graphical settings. And should the original source be updated in the future, the spawned event will update as well. Spawned events can also be preserved and remain on the map if the player reenters the map or reloads a save.

Continue reading

Yanfly Answers Questions

It’s almost been a month since the QnA video.

So now, let’s answer them! 😀

Also, let me know in the comments below if you all would like to have more QnA sessions like this in the future!

Lots of Plugin Updates

DevToolsError

I’m sure many of you who have updated to MV version 1.6.0 or higher have encountered that error message. Why does it occur? It’s because ever since MV has updated to version 1.6.0 or above, it uses a newer version of NodeJS, the client that runs your game. For whatever reason, this version of NodeJS removed the isDevToolsOpen() function, making some of the code used in many of my plugins (64 to be exact) to leave behind this error message whenever custom but flawed code is entered in a script call or a Lunatic Mode segment. This issue is now “remedied” by just simply bypassing the check. You will still need to open up the Dev Tools window on your own using the F8 key to see the error stack that’s produced.

In any case, here’s the following plugins that have been affected and are now updated to have this issue fixed:

For main plugins:

For the extension plugins:

Whew! Be sure to take the time to update your plugins, everyone!

Happy RPG Making!

KemonoSD Character Pack!

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Today Aekashics releases the KemonoSD Character Pack!

A collection on anthropomorphic characters inspired by JRPG and dungeon crawling tropes, which includes frontview battlers, 4-direction map sprites and facesets!

You can purchase it over at their itch.io store today!

Support Ækashics for more content like this!

Ækashics on Twitter!

Ækashics on Youtube!

Ækashics on Tumblr!

Ækashics on Gumroad!

Ækashics on Instagram!

Librarium Monster suggestion box!

Map sprites, facesets and more!