Making Living Weapons

[Sanguine Persona]

So during one of my game dev sessions i was thinking about interesting things I could do in the game. One idea I thought of was to have some kind of living weapon that devours enemies and gets stronger for it.

I started thinking about it and went "huh this isn't so bad" My first thought was for a weapon that adds the devour skill, the skill would then call a fairly complicated common event and check that the enemy was under X% health or something and if it was kill it and add 1 to a variable.

I then thought "easy now I just have to get the variable to add to the weapon damage, that shouldn't be hard..." Except it kind of super is.

Then (while I was writing this post even) I thought AHA, I can just add to the actors parameters directly in the common event while recording it in a variable so i can remove it later.

A chunk of thought later and it should work, but it's really not easy.

So I suppose the purpose of this thread is to ask people if they have had any luck with making evolving weapons like this themselves.

But also to ask if anyone knows any ways to call common events from States or to happen on weapon equip or something.

The biggest issues I was having kept being when I needed to tie a specific function to a weapon and make it affect the player. That area seems really limiting I could barely do anything with it.

 

[Sanguine Persona]

Okay so with my long rambling post up there out of the way. Has anyone else here thought about doing evolving weapons and stuff themselves?

It seems like you could do something really cool with a game with no levelling at all and the only way to get stronger is to sacrifice enemies to your sword (or consume them ala Tales of Beseria) And have the stats you gain depend on what enemy you are facing.

But while I could set something like that up there isn't a nice way to make it tie to the weapon itself. What does anyone else think?

 

[worshipme]

For starters, you could try Yanfly's:
http://yanfly.moe/2015/10/15/tips-tricks-chicken-knife/
http://yanfly.moe/2015/10/28/tips-tricks-hestia-knife-plugin-updates-round-6/
http://yanfly.moe/2015/12/16/tips-tricks-mejais-soulstealer/
http://yanfly.moe/2016/01/20/tips-tricks-rod-of-ages/
edit it to your liking.

 

[Kes]

Please note that 'Game Mechanics Design' is for looking at aspects of game play from a more conceptual level. Implementation (How do I....?) questions belong in the Support forum for the engine you are using.

I would ask everyone replying to stick to the broader design aspects of the question, not the implementation of it.

And also
[dpost]Sanguine Persona[/dpost]
If you want to add something, just edit your earlier post.

 

[kirbwarrior]

I actually thought you were talking about living weapons as characters in the party, not equipment, before I opened the thread. That would probably be much easier to edit.

 

[Basileus]

For clarity: What happens mechanics-wise with Velvet in Tales of Berseria is different than cutscenes and story. In the story she can consume enemies to become more powerful, but in actual combat her "consume" attack is just a skill that deals damage and causes her to enter a special state temporarily almost like a "super mode".

Previous Tales games like Tales of Symphonia and Tales of Vesperia have the Devils Arms/Fell Arms that have an ATK stat equal to the number of units a character has killed. This works because the game keeps track of the number of enemies killed (obviously) and since it is a separate stat it can be called on by any function in the game.

An ability like this can be done in RPG Maker with smart use of states and common events. Off the top of my head, I think it might be possible to add a state for each party member that is applied on dealing damage - which clears the previous character state of course - and then to call a common event to check which state was on an enemy when it dies and increment a variable for each character to track their kill count. While characters have their "living weapon" equipped their standard attack should be replaced with a skill that resembles their normal attack command but with a damage formula to add their kill count variable to their strength/attack stat to determine damage. If these "living weapons" are not the only weapons available, then another common event can be set to parallel process to change the attack command to this special attack while the "living weapon" is equipped and change to back if it is ever not their equipped weapon.

That only works for when you want an "attack which gains power for each enemy killed" of course. If you want living weapons to execute enemies or do things to enemies while they are still alive then you will have to do something else. So it really depends on what you actually want to do.