Creating a Difficulty Settings without a script!

[Bloodmorphed]

I see people asking for difficulty setting here and there and people answer it. Well I'm going to show how to make a difficulty setting without the need for complicated scripts. This tutorial is more for newer people then vets as I'm sure you would know how to do this. Also I haven't seen a tutorial on this at all.

So here it goes!

First you want to figure out your settings lets go with something simple for this tutorial

Easy

Normal

Hard

Now that we have this down lets do our states. 

Make an Easy State:

Make a Hard State:

Why not make a normal state? Well normal is the normal mode and it will be the default difficulty.

Then what you are going to have to do is have the player Choose their difficulty.

After you have had the player pick their difficulty, it is time to make sure if it is easy or hard the enemy troop has either the EASY or HARD state!

I hope this is helpful to the new guys around here. I hope it is easy to comprehend and I hope you like it! Cheers!

EDIT:

For the people who are interested in a Script for this, I have written one here:

http://forums.rpgmakerweb.com/index.php?/topic/31237-ace-difficulty-script-v20/?p=303429

 

[ShadowDragon440]

Very nice write up thank you.

 

[Bloodmorphed]

Glad you like it. Thanks for the read.

 

[Misaki]

Very simple and very good for new users. Though it doesn't take much to add any new things in (Adds poison to all characters on start').

 

[TroyZ]

okay one question

you used the turn 0 to apply the difficulty states into the entire troops. but what happen when the enemy is dead, but the dead enemy was ressurected? did they also still get the applying difficulty states?

 

[Kes]

You might like to consider adding other parameters to the state.  I think adjusting them as well makes the whole thing more balanced than just adjusting ATK and HP.

If you do that, though, making everything 200% would be a very tough challenge, so it might be better at 150%.  Using this basic system could encourage people to customize their difficulty levels more.  I use a script myself because I want to adjust exp, gold and drops as well.  If I didn't I'd consider doing it this way.

Thank you for putting this out to encourage others. 

 

[Bloodmorphed]

okay one question

you used the turn 0 to apply the difficulty states into the entire troops. but what happen when the enemy is dead, but the dead enemy was ressurected? did they also still get the applying difficulty states?

I'm not exactly sure what you are suggesting here? I haven't  tested it on a resurrection enemy before, but you would need to event that to begin with so you would (probably) need to do it a bit different then what I have.

You might like to consider adding other parameters to the state.  I think adjusting them as well makes the whole thing more balanced than just adjusting ATK and HP.

If you do that, though, making everything 200% would be a very tough challenge, so it might be better at 150%.  Using this basic system could encourage people to customize their difficulty levels more.  I use a script myself because I want to adjust exp, gold and drops as well.  If I didn't I'd consider doing it this way.

Thank you for putting this out to encourage others. 

You can do the EXP thing without the script but it would be a bit more of a hassle the way I am thinking of doing it, so it is best left untouched unless I can find a better way of doing it.

This is a very simple difficulty system. I could make a more complex one using this event system and so can other people. But as this is for new users I didn't want to get too complicated on them you know. Making one for advanced users isn't need as advanced users will know how and what to do, even better then me.

Also, balancing everything to those percentages would take some skill. Also in my game you would be slaughtered in insane difficulty right now.  Also I am working on some sort of difficulty system to provide a EXP increase easily, so when I figure it out I'll update the tutorial. I have a few ideas on how to do this, you could probably do this with a script after the battle is over and calling a common event for a add experience formula. Though I'm not quite sure how to call common events after battles. Would you know how to do that?

 

[TroyZ]

I'm not exactly sure what you are suggesting here? I haven't  tested it on a resurrection enemy before, but you would need to event that to begin with so you would (probably) need to do it a bit different then what I have.

so means that your event trick in here can't be done with the enemy that were ressurrected, because the difficulty states only added at the beginning of the battle and not being added for the second time (because once the battler was dead, the states all were cleared at the time). i asked this because of many possibilities of enemies, for example the summoner when the summoner can ressurect it's own army, but once the summoner get it first difficulty states applied (at the beginning of battle), the ressurected army wouldn't get the difficulty states applied to them once they're dead and revived

 

[Bloodmorphed]

so means that your event trick in here can't be done with the enemy that were ressurrected, because the difficulty states only added at the beginning of the battle and not being added for the second time (because once the battler was dead, the states all were cleared at the time). i asked this because of many possibilities of enemies, for example the summoner when the summoner can ressurect it's own army, but once the summoner get it first difficulty states applied (at the beginning of battle), the ressurected army wouldn't get the difficulty states applied to them once they're dead and revived

Ah, then like I said. You would have had that evented anyway, I don't think you can do that without events. What you would do is just have the states reapply if the summoner resurrects them.

 

[izanamikun]

This is a really great, simple tutorial! Thanks for this, I never considered using states to determine things like difficulty. Opens up a whole new world of possibilities!

 

[Najir]

This is great. Will be using this with my game, thanks!

 

[brunty54]

I don't know if I'm just a horrific n00b but when I tried to use this in my game the easy and normal difficulties worked like a treat but the Hard difficulty didn't seem to work at all. I think the Enemy Recover All is removing the 'Hard' state. Any suggestions to get around this?

 

[TroyZ]

just as the name, recover all means remove all states and fully restores all HP and MP. maybe you shouldn't include the hard state within the recover skills

 

[GrandmaDeb]

just as the name, recover all means remove all states and fully restores all HP and MP. maybe you shouldn't include the hard state within the recover skills

So is this correct or is the recover all not correct?


I am afraid I am not quite understanding the reasoning here....

 

[bgillisp]

Instead of enemy recover all, could you use change enemy HP, increase by 99999? Unless you have enemies with more than 99999 HP, this should restore them to full health too.

 

[Stefto]

Wouldn't it be easier to make a comon event out of this instead of calling the conditional branch each time?

 

[Wavelength]

This is a very neat idea.  It would be equally simple to (for example) set a single "Hard Mode" switch that can be used as a condition for bosses' most punishing skills, or even as a page condition for a boulder to show up in your classic "push boulders onto switches" puzzle, to make the puzzle a degree of difficulty higher.

 

[Matseb2611]

This is pretty nice. I personally like to use just a single switch (so far I've only had two difficulty modes in my games - normal and challenging), and having a switch activate if the player chooses challenging, you can then do A LOT of stuff with just 1 switch. You can give enemies new attacks and have those active only when the switch is on, you can make new events happen in the troop events tab when the switch is on (for example more enemies entering the battle or enemies using buffs!), and a lot more stuff. It highly depends on the game of course, but if the dev wants to go as basic as possible, all they need is just 1 switch.

 

[Bloodmorphed]

Well, as I have been away for awhile I'll be rethinking this set-up. As it could have problems with states. (Especially the Enemy Recover All line).

As I am developing a Dungeon Crawler I will be using a difficulty setting (hopefully) based on this type of system. 

 

[Valentor Denesto]

Excellent tutorial! I have been looking for exactly this. Thank you very much!