Battles!

Here's an important part of any RPG: battles! Like everything else, battles are events. RPG Maker comes with a very detailed battle system already in place, so all we need to do to get started is make the monsters!

Making a Monster

I've made a forest map for my monsters to be in. First, switch to event mode and make a new event where you want your monster to be. For enemy battles, always change the trigger to "Event Touch". In the command list, go to page 3 and choose "Battle Processing..."

A box will appear and you can choose what kind of monster you want to be on the battle screen. Keep in mind this will be the image that your characters fight in battle, not the sprite that will be on the map. RPG Maker has a short list of preset monsters, I'm choosing the default ghost. The numer after the asterix (eg. Ghost*2) means that's how many monsters there will be on the battle screen. You can edit or create new troops if you like. You can also set the options of whether your players can escape from this battle or not, and whether the game continues if they lose (good for impossible bosses that you want the player to learn a lesson from, not defeat).

Now we have a conditional branch for whether the player wins or loses. If my player wins, I want their experience to go up, so on page 3 of the event commands I chose "Change EXP" and set it to go up 5 points for the entire party

 

Also, make sure to add "Erase event" from page one after the experience increase. Otherwise the enemy will always be there even if you defeat it. It will reappear if you leave the map and come back, but that could be fixed with a switch.

If they escape, I don't want anything in particular to happen so I'll leave that blank. Now we need to make an image for the event to correspond with. On the left side of the event page there is an empty box labeled "Graphic." Double click this box and the list of monster sprites will come up.

A good sprite to go with the ghost enemy is 051-Undead01, so I'll click on that one. It also gives you a few options on what you want the ghost to look like first thing.

The last thing I'll do on the event page is change the Autonomous Movement to Random so the ghost sort of wanders around the map.

Now your ghost is ready for fighting! Try testing your game and walking up to the ghost. It should go to a battle screen and let you fight your new monster!