How do you go about database work?

[Solo]

The difficult part of doing this in RPG maker, is that you can't always move things around in the DB without having to make changes elsewhere. Ultimately, once something is in there, it's a pain to move. For people doing certain types of events and scripts (where you refer to an item/skill/actor by ID) you may have to do a lot of updates just to move 'dark sword of doom' to a different slot. This is why I strongly recommend doing that as little as possible.

Yes, yes, exactly, and as I said, such a nightmare scenario is what killed my motivation in an older project.

That's why I don't make predefined slots for things, because what if I get new ideas midway through a project? Plus, just looking at the limited number of slots I allocated for any certain thing would make me feel like a caged animal. "Oh no, I better stay within these restrictions." Nope, not me...

Of course, I tried my best to make healing items near the top of the list, but again, once I got deep into development, I realized the need for more than I originally projected, and I wasn't going to screw up my entire game just for the sake of neatness. AND I wasn't going to stifle the creative spark, either.

At least items, weapons, and armor are all categorized on the item list.

 

[Engr. Adiktuzmiko]

Maybe a way to counter that is to create a custom reference to your items, though it would need quite a lot of scripting... Like using keys (setting them via notetags maybe) instead of the indexed array style used... which leads me to a new idea... Hmmm...

 

[Espon]

The difficult part of doing this in RPG maker, is that you can't always move things around in the DB without having to make changes elsewhere. Ultimately, once something is in there, it's a pain to move. For people doing certain types of events and scripts (where you refer to an item/skill/actor by ID) you may have to do a lot of updates just to move 'dark sword of doom' to a different slot. This is why I strongly recommend doing that as little as possible.

That's why I don't make predefined slots for things, because what if I get new ideas midway through a project? Plus, just looking at the limited number of slots I allocated for any certain thing would make me feel like a caged animal. "Oh no, I better stay within these restrictions." Nope, not me...

That's why you leave plenty of room.  The current game I'm working only has 8 swords planned at the moment but I have space for 20 in the database in case I want to add more.  By properly setting up the database ahead of time, you can avoid having to move anything around if you decide to make any changes or additions.

 

[ObtrusiveWhale]

I just thought I'd let you know how we've been doing it in our project. Basically we started with how a few people mentioned above. Just throwing things on there as they came to us, and filling in the blanks later. This is a great way to get started, but if you're at all someone who likes organization, and you know, being able to easily find what you're looking for (especially in a game as long as yours is planned to be), you should really pick an organizational technique. What we ended up doing was writing out a skill list for all the playable characters in a notebook. Then we entered all of the skills into the database grouped by class. This way everything is neat and organized.

When it came to the weapons and armor we decided how many times we wanted our characters to be able to upgrade throughout the game. For us, that number was 10. We created the weapons by character making all 10 of their weapons in a row. We did the armor in sets so basically the "level 1" shield, head, body, and accessory would be the first of 10 sets for a characters armor section. 

This works great for us as we can plug things in where they need to be very easily, and we have to change very little as we go along. The thing to always be open to editing is really the stats on weapons/armor and the damage formulas as you may find they need some adjusting while you continue to create your game. Fortunately this does not involve moving any of the pre-plugged in skills/weapons/armor and will automatically update it throughout your game where needed! Hope this helps.

=D

 

[CWells]

Yeah, start with just a general list of what equipment should be in your game. The characters the skills and the name of these skills. Don't worry about formulating everything yet.. Use the note box in your skills tab to assign skills to what things like:

Sand blast is Special for Sibun. Or Electric magic drains strength. Things like that. Abuse the note box.

When making your actors and setting up classes just jot stuff down there.

Michelle is a lower class kight. Victor is a high class captain. ETC.

You're going to be moving back and forth a lot. Jumping from actors to skills to enemies. Troops you don't have to worry about until much later, like, once you have most of your enemies down..

Be careful though. You can't sort things so if you go about it at random, you're stuck with a randomly organized set of skills. So you'll end up looking for your heal spell squashed between a special and some other thing...

 

[Engr. Adiktuzmiko]

basically, good planning is the start of making things... plan out what you plan to have to in your game, and of course put some buffer (additional database slots so that if you ever felt the need to add something)