Is it possible to chain combos to learn a new skill?

[AllenMP]

Hello,

I'm currently working on my first game and I thought of this mechanic where a person would have to use a specific skill order to learn a new skill.

For example:

To learn Hot Water, the person would have to use Fireball then Waterblast then Fireball again.

I've been trying to get it to work by using switches since I can't use scripts (I only have the free version of RPG Maker). However, I can't seem to get it to work. Is there any way to do this without having to use scripts?

If not, is there a way to keep track of how many times a person uses a skill. Similar to the Tales series where a new skill is learned after a certain one has been used.

For example:

To learn Fireblast, the person would have to use FIreball 20 times.

Thank you

 

[Zevia]

You could make your Fireball and Waterblast skills call common events each. Perhaps for the Fireball common event, it has a conditional branch that checks for a switch - HotWaterReady. If that switch is on, then the actor learns Hot Water.

Then, if HotWaterReady is off (so the else statement for HotWaterReady on), it turns on a switch (FireballUsed, for example). Then, Waterblast has a conditional that checks if FireballUsed is on - if it is, then it turns on the HotWaterReady switch and turns FireballUsed off. If FireballUsed is off, then it turns off HotWaterReady.

Is there only one actor who can learn this ability, or is it that anybody who uses it can? If it's anybody, you'll probably have to create separate Fireball and Waterblast skills for each actor to call a common event specific to each actor.

The other issue I can see happening is that, if someone uses Fireball, then the battle ends, the switch will remain on, such that the next battle, they could use Waterblast and learn Hot Water - so you'll need some way to turn off the FireballUsed and HotWaterReady switches at the end of each battle. Without scripts, you'd probably have to add a page to each troop that, on turn 0, turns off both switches.

EDIT: Here are some pictures to give you a visual aid if you need.

Spoiler

 

[AllenMP]

After looking at the details multiple times, I finally understood how the switches worked together to chain skills.

Thank you so much. The visual cues helped so much in understanding the logic behind the switches.

As for the issues you highlighted, it will only be the main character that will learn skills from chained combos. The other characters will have separate skills.

For the second issue, I'll probably just use your suggestion of restarting the switches at the start of every battle.

Big thanks again for the help.

 

[Wavelength]

There are ways to require skills to be used one after the other in order to learn the skill without using scripts: for example, you could have each skill (at the beginning of its formula) set Variable 11 equal to Variable 12, then set Variable 12 to a number that represents which skill you're using, and then run a Common Event that checks the values of variables 11 and 12 and if they are the appropriate pair, the character will learn the skill.  (The purpose of using two different variables is so you can track the actor's "last skill used" and "current skill used" - if you only used one variable, it would be overwritten by the current skill before the check.)

Your damage formula would look something like: $game_variables[11] = v[12]; $game_variables[12] = 108; a.mat * 4 - b.mdf * 2

This is somewhat clumsy though - it takes about a third of the space you have in your damage formula, and also requires you to make each skill unique to each actor (so if two different actors can learn Fireball, you would need to make a separate version of Fireball for each.  So ideally if you want to do interesting and complex gameplay stuff like this, you will want to buy the full version and enable scripting.

You can pretty easily track the number of times a skill has been used, by the way: just add one to a variable at the front of the damage formula.

BTW, from now on, post questions like this in the appropriate "Help" subforum (VX Ace).  Game Mechanics is for discussion of game design elements, rather than "how-to" questions.

 

[AllenMP]

Thank you for your input as well.

My bad on the wrong topic part. I'll make sure to get handle on that next time.

 

[Mysticphoenix]

It reminds me of Invoker in DotA.