I mentioned back in January that I had purchased RPG Maker VX Ace, and then I never said another word about it. Well, it hasn’t been collecting dust. I decided to take a break from my current game project to make a little combat tutorial I thought might be useful.

RPG Maker is an outstanding product, but it heavily favors the classic Dragon Quest-style RPG. My project has a futuristic cyberpunk setting, so a lot of my options are limited. There are some fantastic sci-fi tile sets out there (I am eternally in debt to Celianna’s Futuristic Tiles–well worth the $19.99), but the non-fantasy battlers selection on the market was still dismal last I checked. With VX Ace’s default combat system out of the picture for me, I had to get a little creative. I’ve been trying to develop increasingly more complex in-map combat sequences, and I thought it would be a fun break to make a little demo of the Region exploitation that’s been empowering it all.

In this video, I employ Regions, Game Data variables, and the Get Location Info function to generate a map in which combat events are triggered by the player’s location in relation to a moving enemy. You might notice I overlooked a few commands in the victory sequence that will prohibit the player from winning while facing down. Simply copy and paste the previous conditional, change the direction fix from up to down, and switch the jump direction from -2 Y to +2 Y.

I noticed this video sometimes ends early for no apparent reason in its embedded form. You can view it at its proper length of 19 minutes directly on youtube if it’s not working here.