Make Your Own Game Tutorial VI: Creating Encounters Part 1

Purpose of Encounters
Encounters in roleplaying games serve several
purposes, and being aware of these purposes is important
to designing your own games. There are two purposes that
are more prominent than the others.
The first is challenge.
Without challenge, a video game would just be a
slightly interactive movie. While there are some works in
that direction, for the most part, games need challenge of
some sort.
In RPGs the two major form of challenges are generally
encounters and puzzles, and in most cases the majority fo
challenges fit into the former. points. The experience the characters receive allows them
The second purpose is progression. to go up in level, while the gold is used to buy better
equipment.
There are two ways encounters promote progression.
The first of which, and what we will focus on in this tutorial The other way it promotes progression is that
is character growth. encounters can progress the story. Boss fights are one
example of this. Another is encounters that drop items that
In a standard RPG, as the characters wins more and you need to complete the current portion of your quest.
more encounters, they accrues more gold and experience

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 Make Your Own Game Tutorial VI: Creating Encounters Part 1
Encounter Areas Now that we have looked at why we have encounters,
we can begin to plan out how we want to lay out those
encounters.
The first thing to do is look at all the maps you have
created that are going to be “danger” maps where encounters
can occur. I have made three of those maps for the sample
game: The World Map, The Ruins, and The Fire Cave.
So now we need to decide what enemies should be
encountered in each map. But wait, what if we want one
map to have different encounters in different areas? That is
where Region IDs come in, which will be explained after
we determine the individual encounter areas (distinct areas
with their own encounters) we will use.
I decide to divide my world map up by geographical
area, and leave both the other maps as just one encounter
area each.
So I have the following encounter areas: World Map:
Grass, World Map: Hills, World Map: Forest, World Map:
Snow, World Map: Volcanic Island, The Ruins, and The
Fire Cave.

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 Make Your Own Game Tutorial VI: Creating Encounters Part 1
Using the Region ID Layer
With the encounter areas decided, we now need to
divide up our World Map into areas.
We do that by using the Region ID layer. In the Map
Editor switch to the World Map. Once there, switch to the
Region ID layer. The button for this is between the Event
Layer button and your pen tools. Though you can’t select the fill tool, you can use the
drag left click to select clusters of the same Region ID. This
Once there your tile palette will be replaced with
layer operates independantly of the others, so you don’t
incredibly gaudy colors with numbers on them from 1 to
have to worry about it copying the graphics when copying.
63. Don’t worry, they don’t show up in game.
After you finish wth the grass, paint the other terrain
Select the number you will be using for grass (in
types in your map with different numbers based on the
my case 1, and paint across all your grass tiles. It operates
encounter areas you set up previously. I used 2 for Forests,
identically to the pen tool.
3 for Hills, and 4 for Snow (Snowy forests included).

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 Make Your Own Game Tutorial VI: Creating Encounters Part 1

Now that we’ve divided it out, I’m going to take one

more step that has more to do with personal preference.
A lot of people don’t like world maps very much, and
one of the reasons is that its just filler for encounters. To
help prevent this problem, I decided to make roadways not
have any encounters.
To do this, I just selected the null Region ID (upper
left of the palette) and erase the Region ID off of the road.
To help with people who don’t quite follow the road exactly,
I spread the null Region ID out one tile away from it. I’ll
set an NPC somewhere to tell the players that roads are safe
for travel.

After I finish up the mainland, I’m going to take a

quick jaunt down to the volcanic island and I can paint
that with 5.
Now we’ve set up all the Region IDs so that we can
use them to seperate encounter areas.
Region IDs, much like Noteboxes, can also have
additional uses added through scripts.

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 Make Your Own Game Tutorial VI: Creating Encounters Part 1
The Experience Curve Milestones and Expected Level
Experience progression is a hard thing to balance and All games have milestones in their progression of
it has a lot of moving parts. To begin with, I’m going to plot. These are points in the game where you tend to open
discuss those moving parts, then I will discuss how they up more encounter areas, or when they fight a boss fight.
interact.
Every milestone shoud have an expected level. This
The first part is the experience curve itself. The is the level that the encounters are designed around for
experience curve is the total experience needed to get to each difficulty. Being higher level will make the area easier, and
level. In the example game, I’m leaving this at the default. being lower level will make it harder.
Below is the default experience curve in RPG Maker VX
Ace. Your job as a game designer is to make sure that most
players end up as close to expected level for each portion of
the game unless they do some really heavy grinding or skip
a lot of stuff.
The example game has the following milestones with
expected levels listed:
• Start: Level 1
• Obtain Boat: Level 4
• Open Fire Cave: Level 5
• Face Final Boss: Level 6

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 Make Your Own Game Tutorial VI: Creating Encounters Part 1
Average Number of Encounters per Area this expect a lot of complaints

This one is much harder to nail down and you will Another option, is to require the player to get a certain
have to playtest to figure it out. number of drops for a quest before progressing.

What you want to discover is the average number of In the example game, there will be a boat sitting at
encounters you will interact with in a certain area, if you the end of the dock on the world map so that players can
go directly for what you need to reach your next milestone. travel to the volcanic island. But what is keeping characters
Since most players aren’t going to go directly at it, you from walking straight too it and going directly to a higher
should probably add about 20% to that number just to get expected level encounter area?
a better idea of what most players will do. In this case, I’m going to add in a short quest of
This is the one variable in character progression that collecting some wood from plant type enemies in order to
is the hardest to adjust. The other variables you can change fix the boat. This requires the player to stick around the area
directly, you can change the experience curve directly, and until he has gone through a certain amount of encounters
you can change your expected level just by balancing around to get those drops. (This will be added in a later tutorial,
a different level. but it is important to know it will be done in this tutorial.)

But it isn’t impossible to change this variable. The

most direct way to change it is to add distance between two
points, making it just take longer to travel.
You can also just make encounters more common,
though at a certain point this angers players. No one wants
to fight every three steps, and if you design a game around

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 Make Your Own Game Tutorial VI: Creating Encounters Part 1
Planning Encounters in RMVX Ace Planning Enemies
We’ll get to putting all those variables together in a The first thing we need to do is create ememies for
minute, but first, we need to learn how to set up encounters each encounter area. The way I find easiest to do this is to
so that we can measure average encounters through create another spreadsheet to match enemies to area.
playtesting.
I start using a combination of the area and my
Encounters are built in two tabs in the Database: available graphics to lay out some monster ideas. Make sure
that it makes sense for the area. For an example, I selected
Enemies Tab: The Enemies Tab is where you build individual
the Plant monster Battler to create my Man-Eating Plant,
enemies
which logically resides in the Forest area. Try to make sure
Trooops Tab: The Troops Tab is where you put groups of you have several differnt monsters for each area.
individual enemies into specific encounters for the player
to encounter. Another thing I add is a Type Column. In this column
I pop down a short description of its gameplay mechanics.
This is an intuitive approach, and will be the same Make sure to makes some variety in how they play. Variety
approach we will take while designing the encounters for is one of the most important things in Encounter Design.
each encounter area.
The first thing I suggest to do is get familiar with all
your available monster graphics. For the example game, I
am going to be using RTP monsters only. Go to the Enemies
tab in the database double click on a monster graphic, and
scroll down through the graphics available to you.

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 Make Your Own Game Tutorial VI: Creating Encounters Part 1
Putting the Enemies into Troops
Now, you can repeat the same process by combining
the individual enemies you created into planned troops.
Make sure you have a variety of different possible encounters
in each area.
I aimed for 5 encounter types in each area, plus 3
special encounters at the bottom that will be used for a The combination of enemies will create very different
item drop collection quests. encounters. Above is one of my encounters. I labeled how
I would approach it as a player, which is influenced by the
amount of threat the enemies pose to me.
Below, even though the Wendigo is a bigger threat,
I would prioritize the two imps as they are quicker to kill.
Variety creates multiple required approaches, which requires
players to think through their actions.

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 Make Your Own Game Tutorial VI: Creating Encounters Part 1
Laying out the Framework: Enemies Tab Instead of trying to put everything in at once and
eyeball the EXP and Gold, we are going to set up encounters
The first action we are going to take is to set up the so that we can easily test areas to get all the variables we
framework in the Database. need so that we reach our milestones at the levels we want.
Go to the Enemy Tab of the database. For this pass
First go through and name all your Enemies based on
through, we will only be concerned with the section shown
what you planned out in your spreadsheets.
below:
Second, set all their stats to 1, this will let us fight
through them quickly during the encounter rate testing.
Third, set the Battler Graphics. Use the Hue slider to
change the Battler color!

Fourth, set any quest drops in to judge how long it

takes to acquire them. I’m setting the Man-Eater Plant to
drop a new item: Morph Logs, which will be used to fix the
boat.

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 Make Your Own Game Tutorial VI: Creating Encounters Part 1
Laying out the Framework: Troops Tab From there, you can drag the the monsters around
on to set them how they will appear in the encounter. I
Next, we can set things up in the Troops Tab. Flip personally like to break up the horizontal top and bottom
your spreadsheet over to your encounter groups and start lines created when you added them. Move them around to
filling them in. get a more “random” look.
All you have to do is select the monster you want on
the right, and click Add to put them in the encounter...

You can name your Troops however you want, but

I prefer just to click the Autoname button to finish our
... and repeat as needed until the encounter is filled. current work in the Troops Tab.

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 Make Your Own Game Tutorial VI: Creating Encounters Part 1
Laying out the Framework: Map Properties On this, there are only three things to pick from:
Save your work in the Database and close it out by 1. Troop. Here just select the troop you want to apply
hitting OK (You should be saving regularly using the Apply to the map.
button, You don’t want to lose all that work you are putting
in). Right click on one of your World Map and select Map 2. Weight. This determines how common the
Properties. We are interested in the Encounters section encounter is in its areas. The higher the more common they
shown on the right below. will be. I left it on 10 for all the encounteres except the
Wisp encounters, which I wanted a bit rarer and set to 5.
3. Range. This determines where on the map this
encounter will show up. On the two dungeon maps, we can
just select Whole Map for all of them, but on the World
Map we will need to select by Region ID. You can select up
Double click on the list to open up a new Encounter to 3 Region IDs per Encounter. If you need more Region
for this map. IDs (like the Orcs*2 Encounter) just add it again and add
the other Region IDs there.
The only other thing to adjust here is Steps Average,
which determines the average number of steps between
encounters on the map. It is below the encounter list.

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 Make Your Own Game Tutorial VI: Creating Encounters Part 1
Connecting Maps with Transfer Events
To do our testing, we need to connect together all
our maps with Transfer Events, so that it is easy to test our
encounter areas.
To do this go back to your World Map and switch
On the New Transfer Event Popup, we ony have two
to the Event Layer. In this section I wil build the transfer
options. The direction option will change what direction our
event between the World Map and the Village. You can
character is facing after being transfered. For the moment, I
build the rest of the transfers following the same method.
will leave this on retain.
Right click on your transfer location and select Quick
To change the destination, just click on the ...
Event Creation => Transfer.
and select the map and coordinates you want the player
transfered to. Repeat until all of your exit and entrance
points have transfer events.

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 Make Your Own Game Tutorial VI: Creating Encounters Part 1
Placing Player/Boat Starting Positions Changing Tile Passability
Now, you may wonder how we are going to get from Now we can walk across all our maps at one ti... But
the mainland to the island while playtesting. wait! We can’t walk on that dock!
We are going to place the starting position for the I actually made this mistake when I built the original
boat. To do this, while on the event layer, right click the map. I had assumed that the passability of that tile was set
location below and select Set as Starting Position => Boat. to allow us to walk on it, but it wasn’t. Luckily this gives me
a great time to talk about changing passability.
Repeat this somewhere in the Village but instead
select Set as Starting Position => Player. Open up the Field Tileset in the Tileset Tab and
switch to Tab B. You will see that the two “Dock” tiles are
set to X passability.
Just click on them to cycle the passability until it
changes to O.

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 Make Your Own Game Tutorial VI: Creating Encounters Part 1
Testing to a Milestone
Now we have access to everything we need to test the
average number of encounters to each milestone.
To get to the first milestone, the player will need to
collect 3 Morph Logs from Man-Eater Plants. Since we will
tell them when they are looking at the boat they will need
this, we can move directly walking around the forests to
find encounters with them.
I also go on the assumption that the player will do one
of the two available sidequests available to them up to this
point. For this he will need to collect three Lightning Gems
from Lightning Wisps. (I set them to drop a Lightning
Gem on every encounter).
Play through the section several times attempting to Shown above is a table I created while testing to
get these specific items. Record the number of times you the first milestone 3 times. I then calculated the number
run into each encounter group, and then calculate the total of enemies I encountered averaged between those three
number of enemies you fought. playthoughs.
I counted Lightning Wisps as two enemies, as I wanted This may seem tedius, and it is. All great games require
them to give twice as much experience as other enemies. tons of playtesting.

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 Make Your Own Game Tutorial VI: Creating Encounters Part 1
Putting it All Together Tutorial Wrapup
Now that we know this, we can determine how much
In this tutorial, we have learned how to plan out the
experience each enemy should give on average if all other
encounters we will have in our game. We discussed enemy
variables remain the same.
and encounter variety, and how it forces players to think.
The average number we reached was ~64 enemies. I
We then moved on to implementing the framework
would round this up to 70 since we were going directly at
for the encounters in the editor itself and how to use the
the goals and not everyone would do that.
Hue changing function to make Battler Graphics different
Since we need to reach level 4 from level 1, the player colors.
should gain at least 366 experience across 70 enemies. Since
We also made transfer events, set starting positions of
366/70 = 5.23, we can round up to around 6 xp per enemy
vehicles and players, and changed passability of tiles. And
on the mainland.
finally, we worked out how to test using our framework to
We could also do other things if this amount doesn’t determine how much XP our enemies should give.
work well for us. We could require less Morph Logs or
Elemental Gems to finish the quests, we could change the Next Tutorial Preview
drop rates of the items, or we could even change the weights
of the enemies that drop them. In the next tutorial, we will continue to work
on Encounters. We will work on balancing individual
One thing I did notice was that 30 steps is way too encounters for our party’s expected level, and balancing the
high with such a small world map with safe paths. I changed party’s skills to the encounters we are building. We will also
it to 15 for my second and third tests and it worked much build our final boss.
better.

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