Progress

    Today I got to write a little python code for work that went relatively well.  I can tell it's a complete mess and that if one thing goes wrong, it'll be very difficult to troubleshoot (or at least more trouble than it should be).

    On break, I took some time to plan out some more functionality for the game I'm building initially in RPG Maker.

    The main things I have to figure out to get the functionality I'm going for:

• In 7th Saga for the SNES, there's a minimap:

    That minimap shows you the roaming enemy encounters, and to my knowledge runs entirely separate from the tile map you see on screen.  For example, the mountain or water tiles are typically not something you can pass through, but the dots don't have that problem, they walk wherever they please on the minimap.

    The AI for the dot movement is applied to all the dots throughout the game (they all behave the same).  They randomly walk about until you get within a certain range of them, and then they give chase.  Sometimes if you change direction as they get close to you you're able to shake them off.  They move the same distance "per tick" that you do, so they're not faster or anything.  

   My implementation of that concept will introduce different colored dots based on the type of encounter it is, with the possibility of different dot sizes, dot movement patterns, methods of movement relating to character proximity, dots that teleport, dots that spawn more dots, or even dots that remove other dots ("good guys").  You get the idea.  Lots of different variety for the "mini game" of whether or not you want to try avoiding (or pursuing) certain enemy encounters.  There might be some that you found out the hard way are way out of your party's league, or perhaps a type that runs away with treasure it has.  Finally, my implementation of the encounter minimap will have the majority of dots following the same tile-based collision limitations that the player is confined within for movement.

• Also following the example of 7th Saga for battle layout and flow, the battle system:

In RPG Maker lingo, instead of using character sprites in the encounter, I want to use "battlers" to represent the characters.  This is seemingly pretty easy with some community driven scripts available out there, so I'm not too concerned about the aesthetics in that regard.  The encounter background doesn't need to be a weird wanna-be 3d perspective of the world tile map either, I'll likely go for regular backgrounds.  

    The last thing I want to say about the battle system is that it's as fast or slow as you want it to be in 7th Saga.  It's completely turn-based, but the actions you decide to take happen immediately; there's no "charging up" moves or long attack sequences (FF7 I'm looking at you).  Just quick, clean back and forth between player team and enemy team.

• Unlike the majority of RPGs I've played, the game I intend to make will eventually feature a randomly generated world map, but the locations (towns, story maps, etc) will have fixed coordinates.  During the second or third playthrough of the game, the player should have a "feel" for where important locations are, but the terrain and small dungeons / other random events in between town A and town B will be entirely different.  This gives the player a new experience, without taking away that intimate  feeling that they know something about the world/game.  This will likely be very difficult to implement in RPG Maker in the way I have it in my head, but it's a feature that game version 1.0 can live without.

• Unlike almost all RPGs out there, items and equipment won't have some numerical stat that you quickly compare to your current equipment and either swap or sell based on those numbers.  Instead, based on your character's innate knowledge of the world and its technology you'll have different levels of revelation for a given item.  For the typical denizen of the game world, a cursed sword (something that takes their charisma down, for instance) would make them have a bad feeling about the weapon.  They'll have options to get their equipment checked out by someone in the world that knows more, but only one type of character will ever get numerical statistics about items or the characters, and that type of playable character will have other disadvantages that balance that ability out.  In RPG Maker, I have no idea how difficult this will be.  Essentially, I believe I'll need a list of descriptions for each item, and it'll need to check your experience with that type of item and the level of knowledge your character has about the world.  My intentions with this feature is to make the player try out different items that they find, and make items more intriguing.  I'd like to imagine a scenario where one player talks to their friend also playing the game, and says "I recently found this sword that my guy referred to as a 'short red blade' and it really kicks butt!" when in reality, it doesn't really do anything differently than the weapon they brandished before that.  Some sort of mythology mixed into items and equipment, but not removing access to the hard facts altogether.

• Last functional piece, there's crafting (again, dependent on who you are and the connections your character has/establishes), and there's no universal currency system, at least not a straight forward one.  My guess is that there will be a currency behind the scenes to facilitate trade between player and npc events, but depending on the type of npc they may have different weights for items you want to trade with them (a smithy might not be interested in potions nearly as much as metal ore, for instance, but might be flexible to give you something smaller for them)  This hopefully will make the player want to consider what to pick up and carry around, but also think realistically about who would be interested in the sort of wares they're looking to pawn.

Alright, that's all for now, I feel better just having that typed out.  If you have any commentary, I would love to hear it!

G'night.