Feature Mechanic: Enemy Encounters

Today, I'm going to go over what I'm using for this game's battle encounters. While RPG Maker MZ offers the classic Random Encounters feature, I was leaning against it because it might have been difficult to make use of the Holy/Dark Bottle mechanic, but also because it can be annoying for players that they would make a little progress, only for something to be thrown into a fight almost right away. So, I went with the other option of having it be controlled, by Event Touch.

The Plugin

First and foremost, I'm using Yanfly's Encounter Effects plugin, which lets me control how events interact on the field using Comment Tags. While having even one of these tags will set them to work as intended, adding more than one will give me options for how different enemies may behave. Naturally, as soon as they see you, they will react, but how long it will take for them to start running is another thing. Some might not run right away, others might. They will give chase until you either run far from their alert range that they will give up and go back, or if you cross through a region that kinda serves as a boundary for not letting Events through. You'll still need to get far from them to get them to leave, but it bets them getting stuck in places. Either way, touching them will cause them to engage you in battle.

Now, after a battle (whether you win or escape), a switch will trigger that will cause other enemies to not be engageable for a short time. An additional Self Switch will trigger (if you escape, winning just erases them until next reload) that acts to turn the last enemy you fought into a Parallel Event so they show the effect of being stunned or whatever, until it's time to turn off those switches and resume everything.

The Bottles

Using the Map Events plugin, I'm able to affect how Players/Events act with various features, including a tint effect. Each Map will have a Parallel event that will control the effect, depending on which bottle is used. The effect, in conjunction with the former plugin, will control how long the effect lasts before it dissipates. If you enter a town, a different event will play where it will store how much time is left on the bottle, run down the tint effect, and put it on pause essentially...at least until you go back to a field or dungeon area.

Now, the Holy Bottle makes it so enemies will move away from you. The Dark Bottle will (ideally) increase their aggro range, their speed, and will even give you a troop to fight that (for the area) has more enemies. It's something I'll be playing around with, as the first area I'm doing this with is meant to ease you into the battle system. So the encounters there won't be 'as' random with what you fight upon contact.

Non-Game Over Scenarios

For story reasons, there will be plenty of places where you cannot Game Over. This includes everything up until the second major boss of the prologue. In such an event, you get taken back to a place to recover and resume your game. This won't always happen, but I feel this would be a fair compromise until I can figure out how to do a proper battle retry, especially for boss fights. That, and since saving is limited to Save Circles, this would be essential.

Wrap-Up

While going through the opening act, I made some tweaks to dialogue, added some new frames for the main characters sitting (as best as I am able to, given my current skill level), and now I'm making sure the first major area works well enough that (if I were to release a working demo of it) this would be sufficient. This of course, includes the map with the first boss fight since I need to make sure the failsafe from above works for this fight as well. I do have other things outside the game project though, but at the moment I have been making some headway here.