First of all, what the hell is this?

I'm sick and tired of hearing "Oh, X is a great RPG, you should check it out." So I go and check out X. And what do I find out? It's exactly like Y, W, Z and all the other RPGs ever made, only with a different plot and a slightly different battle system.

And I'm not talking about cliches, but about conventions – these don't happen in the plot like cliches, they occur in gameplay and world-building situations.

So, I've always been really interested in pen & paper RPG. And not as a player, but as a Dungeon Master (or Game Master, or Storyteller, or etc...). I've always read a lot and gathered a lot of amazing insights into the DM's job: the creation of worlds.

We all play the DM when we use RPG Maker. It's out job to create the world the player will be playing in. So let's make it an experience worth the player's time, shall we?

This is where this project comes in. The objective of this thread is to build a dungeon. A simple dungeon, without a proper game itself around it – just a dungeon. No plot. It's just about the creation of the world, and not storytelling.

What I want with this is to showcase what I've learned from pen & paper DMing and my own ideas about it, in electronic RPG format. Namely, in RPG Maker VX.

So let's make a coherent, interesting, and fun dungeon.



Chapter I – The Brainstorming



Anyone who's ever done anythin in RPG Maker will tell you that it's essential to at least have a general outline of what you plan to do with your game before turning on the console or opening the program. Or else, you'll be wasting hours designing characters, spells and items that you won't end up using.

So, before we actually start to do anything, we've got to think about what we're doing.

We want a dungeon, right? So let's make it a generic, medieval-fantasy dungeon. Just for the hell of it. I want to prove that you can do something fun without inovating.

A dungeon is a place. As all places, it has a history and a purpose. You can't just grab a random cave and fill it random ravaging monsters that attack anything in sight. Yes, I'm looking at you, Final Fantasy, Lufia, Golden Sun, and all the others.

So what is our dungeon? Let's make it an abandoned fort. Soldiers used to live here long ago, but the fort hasn't seen any action in a long, long time.



What is there in this abandoned fort of ours?

Let's put a bunch of orcs in it, shall we? Why? Because we feel like it. So, the fort in mainly inhabited by orcs. But how come the orcs are there?

Let's picture an orc tribe. Let's say that, in this tribe, there's a specially vicious orc dude named... say... Grubtrack. He gets into a fight with the tribe's leader over something (could be anything; gold, orc ladiez, a special item.... whatever). And he really gets pissed at the tribe's leader. And he gathers up a whole contingent of young, rebellious orcs who also, for some reason, want the tribe leader to go.

There's only one problem: they fight the leader and his followers, and they lose terribly.

So the tribe leader decides to exile the rebels. Grubtrack and his followers are thrown out of the tribe, without food, gold, or a place to live. They wander aimlessly for a while (think Moses, only thick-skinned and wih fangs), until they reach an abandoned fort. How convenient!

Grubtrack and his followers make the fort their home. By the time the player characters reach the fort, the orcs will have been living there for a time. Let's say, 6 months or 1 year, something like that. They've really settled down already.

So now, instead of a random fort filled with random monsters, we have a fort inhabitted by an organized small tribe of orc rebels. They don't wander around in he fort, waiting for tasty adventurers to show up: they actually live there, with their women (ugh) and children. They need a source of food and maybe also money. They could hunt the area around the fort, and perhaps there's a group of able young orc warriors who go to the big city from time to time to work as mercenaries.



Once we've got that part sorted out, we want to know why the player characters are here in this fort. This is where the whole plot and game outside the dungeon come into play. Since we don't have that... well, there could be a lot of reasons for the players to be in here.

Just, please, don't make it random. No one wants to go through a dungeon just because it's in the way of the next town.

Grubtrack could have an item that the players want. The players might have a friend who was attacked by the mercenary orcs (remember, the ones that bring money to the settlement), and they've tracked the attackers back to the fort. Maybe they were just hired to kill the orcs by some rich bugger who has a trade route nearby. Maybe they just want to kill the orcs because they think they're Evil (Iunno, there might be more people like SK out there).

That's completely up to the rest of the game, and so we're not going to elaborate on that topic.



So, what have we achieved with this brainstorming section?

First, we have a background an a purpose for the dungeon, as well a huge aesthethic guideline to what our dungeon will look like (an abandoned fort will not look like a puzzle-filled maze, sorry, but like an abandoned fort).

Second, we know what enemies are there to expect: mostly, the players will be facing orc fighters. Making the players fight things like undead or wild animals in there is just too stupid. Also because no sensible creatures (not even orcs) would bear to live in the same place as, say, ghouls and giant venomous spiders.

Third, we have an 'excuse' for the puzzles: they will be traps laid by the orcs against possible invaders. After all, they don't want money-hungry adventurers getting near to their wives (ugh) and children.



This is all great. Just one more thing before we close this chapter down. I'm sure that, after going through all the trouble of coming up with a decent backstory, you'll want the players to learn about it too. But, seriously, making villagers or elders spit out the story at random or laying around books in the dungeon are just lame and feel (righfully) like forced exposition.

Exposition is supposed to be smooth. In our case, I think the best option is to make the players visit the original orc tribe later in the game and learn about the 'traitor Grubtrack' there in a well-built dialogue with some important orc. That's just a suggestion, though.



All the things that we've achieved through the brainstorming process are generally called attention to detail, and it can really add to a game. Not only does it attract some sorts of players, but it also makes the overall experience more rewarding for the DM / game creator himself. And that's just as important as pleasing the players.


I think I've covered all I wanted to cover in this update. Whew, that was a lot.



Also, user input is highly appreciated. Do you have any comments, suggestions, critics, comments? Anything you want to see in our dungeon? Remember, this is your guys' dungeon too!
Let's work together to make it a fun experience for everyone.

I hope I've been able to at least entertain a little with my project here.

Peace out, guys! ^^


Next update: we actually get to open Maker VX!

We need a wild forest around this fort.

How about, what made this cave so valuable as a fort in the first place? Maybe a natural spring?

Also a possible reason for humans leaving the fort is a build up of semi toxic fumes that the orcs can tollorate?

Just thoughts.
By the way you very clearly and thoroughly prove a very great point. Good Job.

Edit: I'm browsing this from the future from my jetpack holophone.

I was actually planning on ignoring the world around the fort. You know, a wild forest is completely different from our fort, and designing it would be deviating too much from the thing we've got going on here. Maybe later, who knows?



When I meant dungeon, I didn't mean literally a cave, but a place where the player characters go and fight monsters and get treasure and all that. A dungeon in general terms. =P

Also, the toxic fumes thing is an awesome idea. That will even serve as a perfect reason for something I'm planning to add later on.

Back on track, guys. Here we are:


Chapter II - Mapping. Yup, maping.


This used to be the part of game making that put me down the most. It was probably because Maker XP's mapping system was time consuming as hell and I never quite understood half the tiles available in Maker 1. VX remedies that and offers a mapping system that's simple and effective, even though it has less stuff available than XP.


But before we open VX, we need to do just a little bit more brainstorming.
So, how does our fort look like? After thinking for a while, I decide to make it a watchtower-type fort. It's an outpost for guarding a road, river, border, or something like that.

Now here's something annoying. So you make a game, and you make a castle with people living inside. It looks like an ordinary and perfectly plausible castle. Now when you go and make a castle that's a dungeon, with monsters and a boss, why oh why build it like a freakin' maze filled with puzzles? It makes no sense. All castles are castles, and all should look like castles. And not like mazes.

I don't want to make a mindless maze-like watchtower. So our first question of the day is, what does a watchtower look like in the inside?

Yes, guys. It's time for... research.

...

...

*time passes*




Are you done with your research? I know I am.
Actually, D&D saved my ass again. The base I'm using for our watchtower is actually based on one I got from Swords & Fists, a "reference book for fighters and monks." Never, ever underestimate pen & paper.

So here's the basic layout that our dungeon will have: Three floors, but the entrance of the tower leads to the second one, and not the first one.
We're also gonna have access to the roof (the actual watchpost), and to a cave below the tower that houses the aforementioned toxic fumes.

This is also another point worth proving: you can make a reasonable and fun dungeon without the need for 100+ floors.





Let's get down to business, finally! We open RPG Maker VX, and start a new project for our dungeon.



First things first, we need a size for the floors. The structure will be the same for all floors, since it's not very healthy for watchtowers to keep changing the size of its floors all the time. After some experimenting, here's what I came up with:





Next up. Floor "skeletons". That's just the walls and floors, no fancy items yet. That's just to get a feel of the size and scale of your dungeon, and to check if the things you want to put in there fit or not.

For wall and floor choice, I went with something that looks more sandy than stony. See for yourself.

Here's the skeleton of the first floor:



Second floor:



And the third floor:



(Notice how I started to add random cracks on the floor; our tower was abandoned, after all).




Now the really fun part. It's time to add the stuff to our maps.

Here's a question you need to ask yourself: How do you want the general feel and atmosphere of the dungeon to be?

Because you'll want to map accordingly.

For our case, how about...
The fort is abandoned, so there's a lot of rubble and broken stuff around. The orcs aren't the most tidy bunch – they won't clean up the place anytime soon. But they do need their own stuff. So our general feel will be one of disorganization, with lots of old and broken things from the original fort mixed with the new things the orcs use.

Sadly, VX hates sideways doors, so these do not exist. =/



Mapping of the first floor:



North and south, you can see the soldiers' quarters. Contrary to popular RPG thinking, you can fit only one person in a bed, and you need real rooms for them. The beds in the soldiers' quarters are abandoned and aren't used by the orcs.

Left is a separate room for the seargents. Notice how there are makeshift beds on the floor, new crates and fresh water on this room. These are things actually used by orcs, and not abandoned.

In the center room, you have the stairs up (remember how the entrance is on the 2nd floor?), and more importantly, a well. The well leads to an underground water reserve, and is vital to the life in the tower. Yes, orcs do drink water, and they also use the well – a lot.

The two rooms to the east were originally used to keep the most varied things, pretty much everything the soldiers got on patrol or that was found around the fort. They're mostly abandoned now.

The hole in the north room leads to the dungeons, which have mainly two purposes:
They are where our toxic fumes are.
And here's the place the orcs evacuate their families to when they're under attack by the characters.



Here's the second floor:




You can see the entrance leading to a big room. This is where the soldiers usually spent their time in when they weren't on patrol, and the same goes for the orcs. Notice how the things on the table are new. There are also makeshift beds here, for some orcs sleep in this room. Don't forget the handy fireplace up top.

Southwest is the tower commander's 'office'. A couple of orcs sleep here, and Grubtrack uses the room actively. The stuff on the table is his.

East is the kitchen, southeast is the food deposit. The orcs have to eat, and they don't necessarily only eat raw adventurer corpses ¬¬ so these are also places in active use by the orcs. The food in the deposit is all new.


Third floor:



South is the archer's arsenal, with lots of arrow boxes. West is the weapon and armor deposit. The orcs use both rooms, which means that not everything found in them will be rusted and useless. Hint, hint for treasure-hunter players.

East is the abandoned room of the officers. Also used by orcs.

North is the tower commander's room. It has a fireplace just for him, look. This is the room that Grubtrack sleeps in – his stuff is all around.




Back to my main point of this update. Notice how, without the rubble and orcs, this place could be called a place? I mean, it looks plausible. People could have lived here. A dungeon is not a quality, is a state of mind. So our watchtower, despite being filled with orcs, is still a watchtower.



This update was less theory and more practical, and the next one will probably be like this, too. Only with smaller image files, I just realized these ended up kinda big =P

See you next time in Chapter III – Mapping Part 2 – the Cave and the Roof (which is not on fire)!

*applause*

This is a very good guide thus far. I hope you don't take the lack of replies as a lack of interest. I am very interested and I am sure others are as well. Keep going cuz this changed my entire thinking for RMing!

Glad I'm helping. ^^

I'm actually pretty short on time. HLuckily, the holiday brings peace of mind, so I think I can get another update done tomorrow or Sunday.



Chapter III - More Mapping.


Let's get the mapping done. Two things are left, the roof and the toxic fume cave.

The roof is mainly a gimmick thing, there for the sake of completion and slight eye-candy. It's also somewhat out of proportion with the rest of the dungeon.




The cave is a whole other story. It's actually gonna be important in the dungeon. This cave is the home of natural gases that are deadly to humans, and they're the reason the tower was abandoned in the first place. Luckily for the orcs, their body is not affected by the gases.

The orcs are not dumb. When their tower is invaded and raided by the party, they promptly evacuate the women and children (and, if their society accepts them at all, the old ones too) to the depths of the cave. Our adventuring party, being composed of humans, can only get so far in the cave. The party won't be able to advance beyond the fumes to where the evacuated orcs, on the northwest corner of the map there.

(The map is zoomed-out)


VX provides us with dandy 'smoke' sprites, ready to use. That's what's blocking the path there.

Also note how the presence of the fumes causes the appearance of strange natural phenomena in the cave – the weird purple-ish rocks and the creatures to be found here (as soon as we get to that =P) are examples.

Caves, unlike built places, are meant to be random. The mapping of that specific cave was done with a mix of VX's random dungeon generator and my 'random mapping'. I think it's a nice size and it'll get the job done fine.

Here is where the players will find the most skilled orcs, and Grubtrack himself.

Just to elaborate a little bit on the backstory before we call it a day, let's say the digging equipment around the cave entrance belonged to the soldiers, but is also used by the orcs. The soldiers discovered that there was something behind their quarters' walls one day, and decided to find out what it was. Sadly for them, they stumbled upon toxicness. Poor soldiers.

The orcs are also digging around the cave, hoping to find something. What are they looking for? I don't know, you tell me. Wouldn't you start to dig around such an awesome place just because it's there?

I guess that's it for the day. Next time we say goodbye to the map editor and enter the heart of computer Makers – the Database (equivalent to the console Makers' System). See you there.

Next Update - Who are we playing as? Meet The Party!

Double post, but also double update!


Chapter IV - Meet the Party

This has to be done in context with the rest of the game, of course. Sice we have no 'rest of the game', we might as well do this now. What is this? Tweaking the player characters, that's what I'm talking about.

Since I don't want to spend too much time on this, I'm going to be basing our party on the default VX starting party, a simple configuration of Hero/Fighter/Healer/Caster. If you want to, you can tweak things waaay more than what I did here. But you know that. So let's get going. ^^

When we open VX's database, we see this for the first player character ('PC'):


Now here's one thing: you can make a whole game without revolutioning the genre, without inovation, without surprises. It's perfectly doable. If you feel it's right to not inovate, go ahead and don't do it.
But, likewise, if you feel it's right to insert a few unexpected things here and there, go ahead and do it. It's one of the sure ways to increase the number of people interested in your game.

And that's what we'll be doing right here. Paladin? Come on. That's lame. I'm freaking tired of playing paladins as main characters. Remember Gobli, where they made fun of the standard JRPG party by calling the leading character 'Hero'? That's what we're avoiding here.

Let's surprise that player.






Now that's more like it.

"But... but... bard?! Everyone knows bards suck!"

First, get over your Edward trauma. Yes, I also wanted to shoot him in the head for his sheer incompetence in FF4. But really... repeat with me: "Final Fantasy does not dictate my life." It's actually pretty unhealthy to think of FF as an ideal form of RPGs.

Second, well, who's making the game? You, or some half-assed convention? I don't think bards suck. As a matter of fact, I believe they rock. So take your stupid convention and flush it down the toilet. You'll be playing a main character who's a bard.

(Also, we all know for a fact that no game is complete without <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ng_See_Yuen">obscure references.</a>)



Before we move on, I decided to do some revamping to VX's default equipment stuff. Kept it simple (just what's necessary for the characters to start out), but still, it's better than the general 'collection of swords' VX throws at us by default.
Note the lack of short swords, longswords, bastard swords, and the like. Yes, it's on purpose. Geez, I'm tired of them.



Again, you can not inovate if you feel like it. But, if you feel like taking the World of JRPG Conventions and shaking it upside-down, go right ahead. No one needs huge swords.

Revamping the armor:



The flute and the holy symbol increase Magic by 4 and 6 for the bard and healer, respectively. But even if they didn't do anything, do you think the player would have the courage to remove them from the Accessory spot in the equipment screen?
It's all about the flavour, guys.

Since our main character is a bard now, he outta have some nifty bard skills. Here's what I gave him:



The first raised Attack of one ally by 150% for 5 turns, the second does the same with Agility.
Fun fact: if you include buffs (these kinds of stat-raising spells) in your game and don't include them in your balance calculations, you might be completely surprised by their effectiveness.
In other words, both the Attack-raising and Speed-raising spells I've got going on there are quite powerful and will need to be takin in consideration when the time to balance fights comes.

That considering all the characters will start the dungeon at level 5. Just to have some magic to work with, you know. Everyone at level 1 is just lame.

For the other characters, I kept the default VX magic list. That means that, at level 5: the fighter gets nothing; the healer gets a healing spell, an 'esuna', and a wind elemental spell; the wizard gets a fire spell, an ice spell and a sleep spell.


To finish, I did some tweaking to the other PCs. Here's what we ended up with in our party.

Our Bard of Awesomeness:


The warrior:

I changed the name to 'Martial Artist'. That is NOT equal to 'Kung-fu fighter'. Check the dicitonary for 'martial' and then 'artist'
Also chose to give her a spear because again, no one would be expecting that. She also gets twice as criticals as everyone else.

The healer:

Now this one is interesting. Again, screw JRPG conventions. Instead of the wimpy White Mage cliche set by Final Fantasy, I went for the cleric cliche set by D&D. Which is: strong, well-armored guy who goes around brandishing his holy symbol against undead and splitting skulls with a huge mace. Yeah, baby.
I also went for an aesthetic change there. The default VX 'priest' looks goofy. This guy looks awesome.

Hey, here's another Convention Break: everyone knows every JRPG party has to have an awesome, Racer-X type of guy. But instead of making him the 'reformed villain with a katana and a scar' (screw Sasuke), I just made him the freaking cleric.
Now that's what I call 'cool'.

And, finally, our caster:

Aesthetic changes to the class name (from 'Wizard' to 'Witch') and appearence.
Also, instead of a lame dagger, I gave her this incredibly stylish weapon, the Kukri.
And she's a witch who knows her way around herbs and such, so the healing items she uses have their effect doubled ('Pharmacology').

None of these characters have any backstory, but that's not necessary.
To be honest, I even prefer when they don't have any, but that's just me. Seriously, FFX would be much more awesome if Tidus was simply called 'Red Wizard' and didn't utter a word for the entire game.




That's it for this update, guys – hoep you're enjoying it.

Next update: ... I haven't really decided yet. Do we start the map eventing? Do we start the enemy creation?

Your input is highly appreciated!

I would like enemy making next.

Maybe they just don't like the hot dry air above ground? Or they ar looking for some gemstones to sell? Or they just figured that the humans must have been looking for something and they want it for themselves.


All of your characters are really interesting and I know nothing of them! Great job on that one




I would like to see the map eventing but either one as they both need to happen anyway.

I've really enjoyed this thread. Can't wait for the next update.

Sorry for the delay, folks.



Good ideas, and thanks. ^^ I really liked the cleric myself.






Chapter IV - I'm in your RPGz, shaping your enemiez

And once again the first thing we should concern ourselves with is some brainstorming. What enemies do we want?

Well, we gotta have some sort of orc patrol – the main encounter in the upper levels of the watchtower. Okay.
For the sake of variety, how about a powered-up version of these regular patrol orcs? We have in any society dudes who are better at a profession than other dudes are. Let's also have some Orc Elites in our tower.
We also have Grubtrack, the big boss of the place, and the players' final challenge in the dungeon.

And that would be it.
If we were lame.
Let's Break Conventionsâ„¢ again!

We have a cave down there, right? And toxic fumes. Tell me an enemy that matches the idea of 'toxic fumes' perfectly, and that's been more than around since the first eletronic RPG ever.

Yes. I'm talking about them.

Sliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiimes!


Heh.

We'll elaborate on that later.


For now...

You've worked with RPGM. You know that 'enemy making' is a part of game creating which will make you go all around the place changing items, spells and other random things. So, the first thing I present you is a new weapon:



You guessed it. This will be droppable by the orcs. It only makes sense that you can steal a dead enemy's weapon, yesno? Even though it's kind of a creepy (not to mention assholish) thing to do.

Moreover, I've added three new spells:





Berserk is a new state I have created that looks like this:



C'mon, some cliches are cool. We all love to see orcs going insane and in a killing frenzy.
Except when you're on the opposite side of the orc's weapon, then, it's not that cool of a sight.

Now for the enemies themselves.

For anyone wondering, the way I balance enemies is this one: I set the enemy's stats to be more or less on the same level of the stats of a character, and work from there. There's no set way to balance things; you've got to change numbers around a lot until you have something you're satisfied with.

For our particular enemies here, I went for a difficulty level that's a tad bit higher than the one you usually find in eRPGs. I think it's cooler to have less encounters that are more delicate than thousands of encounters consisting mainly of 'attack, attack, attack'. Besides, with tons of encounters, you'd need a lot of space to keep all the monsters that are spawning.
I'm sorry, seeing bloody titans and dragons as freaking random encounters in Final Fantasy dungeons makes me want to start a movement against mindless random encounter thinking.

The orc soldier!


He has a 1/7 chance of dropping his armor and his weapon. He also has this nifty attack that may stun. It's there mainly for flavour and as a little annoyance to the player (remember, be very careful when you deliberately put anything more than a 'little' annoyance in your game – the problem with annoyances is that they're annoying).
Orc fighters come in patrols of two. They're balanced for a level 5 party.

Now for something important.

We all know that working with RPGM means working around the limitations of the chosen program. Many times you'll run into graphical problems. And the most overwhelming of these is the lack of resource.

What I mean is, we only have one 'Orc' enemy graphic in VX's RTP ("run-time package", the default stuff that comes with the program). I realy could go around and showcase a few resource sites I know of, but I was wanting to keep this thread going RTP-style. So we have to work around this lack of orcs thing.

I say we resort to using a strategy that I don't like and will never like, one that doesn't make the least sense, one that is almost repulsive, and yet has been around since the primordial days of electronic RPGs. Heck, even Mortal Kombat made extensive use of it.

Yes. I'm talking about palette-swapping here.

Hey, at least it's simple to do – pretty much any graphic program can do it. So, what I did to make ourselves some new orcs was get the standard orc on Photoshop and mess around with Color Balance. The results are rather nice. I hope you can see it well in the small windows below.


The Elite Orc!



These are the ones can go berserk. Their encounter is more challenging than the standard orc fighter one.
They also come in groups of two, and they're balanced for a level 6 party.

The... SLIME!



Unlike the Dragon Warrior development crew, I don't think 'slime' and 'smile' are words that should be associated. These guys are bastards.
They have little HP, but take half damage from all melee attacks. Moreover, every single one of their attacks has a chance of paralyzing the target – a state that has 15% chance of going away every turn and prevents the target from acting. Yeeeaaah.
Oh, I'd forgotten to add it before the shot, but these guys are immune to Sleep – have you ever seen a slime sleeping?
They're found in the cave, in groups of two. They're also balanced for a level 6 party.

And, finally, the Boss!



This guy's cool. He has immunity to Sleep, otherwise it'd be a ridiculous battle. He drops nothing.
He also only has two attacks. Double Attack is there so that, in his turn, Grubby damages two opponents (or one twice) instead of just one. That's pure Challenge Raising, there. Crippling Attack is a very assholish move that drops the Attack of the target by 50% for five turns. There's a way of cancelling it, and that's casting Tune of Courage (which raises attack by 50%) with the main character on the victim, then the attack returns to normal.
But what makes up for a lot of the hassle in the fight against Grubby is this:



That means that in the first turn of battle Grubby will cast a spell that has a 80% chance of poisoing. Every character.
Poison in this game is not the weak patheticness of Pokemon at all. It's also easy to forget since the game offers no extra message when a poisoned character is damaged by the poison. In other words, it's a worry.
Grubby has, on the other hand, no way to poison anyone after the first turn. And that's good. For the player. ^^
What this means basically is that the cleric character will be stuck healing the poisoned party members for the first few turns of the battle. That makes the battle a lot more interesting.

This boss battle, by the way, will be more of an intense and quick battle than a resistance one. If one's not careful, Grubby can perform a world-wrecking act by poisoning, crippling and double-attacking. With no cleric to heal in the first few turns.

Ah, why do I try to describe it? You guys will see when this is ready and the game is submitted to the Mag =]

Oh, this one is also important.

I realized that magic was going around being way too powerful and game-breaking, so I basically nerfed the MP of all characters.

The experience and gold given by the monsters will be set later, when we do the eventing, and we choose the encounter rate and that stuff.

Sorry for the very lousy language today. ^^

And that's it for now, folks!

Next up: Things actually happen in the tower! Tune in for... events.

Made a front page entry about this. Keep up the amazingly good work.

Amazing work indeed. Also, this is the first real look I've had at VX. Mad props to you, sir.

I agree incredibly with the 2 above statements....awesome and inspiring work.

Terribly sorry for the delay – tough week.

Thanks for the support. It's really appreciated. ^^

Alright folks, let's continue. This time we'll be working with doors, and –

Waitwaitwaitwait. What?!

Hm? What's the matter?

Did you say 'doors'?

Uh, yeah?

Doors?!

You have something against doors, son?

Well... you know... I was thinking you were gonna do something more... interesting. Events, puzzles, the like?

Ooh, I see where you're going. Well, fear not, big boy. You'll get your 'interesting stuff'. In time.
Meanwhile, I'm going to show you some hot door-on-character action.



Chapter VI - Doors

The main thing about doors is that they can be locked. And of course you're going to lock your doors when you see armed strangers raiding your house killing your friends. That's why every single door in our dungeon is locked (unfortunately, VX doesn't have graphics for sideways doors and that'd be too much work to do – my spriting abilities suck).

How does one deal with locked doors?

Obviously, first, we have the key-approach. We could make the orc enemies randomly drop an item like 'watchtower key', and that'd be used to open the doors. That's an option, and it's pretty nifty. For no special reason, though, I don't want to do that. Our approach will be different.

Locks can always be picked. I think the most reasonable approach to lock-picking would be to make them pickable when there's a thief character in the party. You know, not everyone knows how to pick locks. In our case, we'll be doing it slightly differently. Look at this:



There are 7 doors in the tower. Let's give the player 3 lockpicks, so he can open 3 doors out of 7 for free (a lockpick is consumed after the door is opened). Assume that the character that'll be doing the picking is Ng See-Yuen, our bard.
If we had any game besides the dungeon, we could make it so the player can buy or otherwise find more than 3 lockpicks before entering the tower. Since we don't, we just give him an arbitrary number of them.



But how does one deal with locked doors once all the lockpicks are gone?

Simple.
Not everyone an pick a lock, but it's mighty easy to kick a door down, charge into it, or otherwise bashing it open. Assuming the material of the door isn't too hard. Our doors are wooden, so kicking them should produce nice results.



Now we must find a downside to bashing the doors open, since it's free (doesn't consume items or anything like lockpicking does).

One possibility is to make bashing not free. What would make the most sense is to take a toll on a character's HP. Say, bashing a door takes 100 HP from the lead character. We aren't going to do that, since it's too unversatile (what if we want someone else to bash the door?).

You know that destroying a door to open it makes a nice sound. A loud one. In a tower filled with orc patrols, this kind of noise is not a good idea. In our dungeon, the punishment for bashing a door is having to deal with a group of Orc Fighters.





Moreover, two important doors (the one leading to the dungeon and the one leading to Grubby's room) are booby-trapped. One will damage the party by 150, the other will poison the entire party. This will happen regardless of the way the door is opened.



Both traps can be avoided by pressing a switch hidden in a plaque beside the wall.




And that's it for doors. Hope you liked it, guys. Next up: Balancing enemy encounter rate / experience? Spreading loot? Dialogue with Grubby? More traps? What do you want to see?

See you next time.

I choose dialogue.

Lol, great idea with the doors.

Yeah, I'd like to see some dialogue. With grubby or characters in general.

I'd also like to take this time to point out that the auto spell check on my computer says dialogue is spelled wrong...but it accepts dialog.

Just fyi, Gnash, the door look awkward with none of the wall-ceiling tiles above them. You should add it since you can walk under those. Just a heads up.

Oh, good one. I'd thought about that, dunno why I didn't try it before. The doors also look bad without that tile, since their opening animation looks crippled without something on top of the door.
Thanks for that, I had an awful brain fart back there >.<

Gnash, this thread is made of legendary and win. I also love the use of IMAGine.