RPG Maker XP Beginner's Tutorial

Database - Enemies

RPG Maker comes with 32 preset enemies for you to battle, but that's not nearly enough! Here's how to make your own new enemies, or make changes to the preset enemies.

Making a New Enemy

As usual, go down to Change Maximum and increase the maximum enemies by at least one and start with your new blank enemy. I'm gonna go old school and make a Starman Jr from Earthbound. Enter the enemy's name.

Now decide what this enemy's stats will be. So far I have a ghost in my game, and their max HP is 540. I want the Starman Jr to be a little stronger than the ghosts, so I'll give him a max HP of 630. SP determines how many skills he can use. Starmen are known for their crippling attacks, so I'll give him plenty of skill points. I'm just ad-libbing on the rest of them.

Set the Efficiencies the same way we did for Actors. I'm going to make him a little storng against all magic, but weak against Dazzle.

Now we need some graphics to represent our new enemy. First you'll need to create a new Battler Graphic and import it into the Materials folder. Then double click the Battler Graphic box on your enemy page and find your new image. I found a picture of a Starman on Starmen.net. This is just for an example. When you're making your own game, it's best to make your own graphics as well.

Now pick out an Attacker Animation and a Target Animation to play when he attacks. The next part is interesting: Decide how much experience and gold players will receive when they defeat the Starman, and also decide if he'll drop any items, weapons, or armor. The probability option determines what percent of a chance there is that the treasure will appear.

Last is the Action box. This can make your fights much more interesting, and make boss fights dynamic and relevant to the story. Let's start by making a new action. Right click below where it says "Attack" and select "Edit..."

This is where things get a little confusing, so make sure to right click on all the labels for help. Conditions are under what conditions this action happens. The condition can be what turn of the fight you're on, how much HP the enemy has, the average level of the party members, or a switch in the game. Switches can be very useful. For example, perhaps you want enemies to start using lightning attacks only when your player has something they can defend themselves from lightning with. For my enemy, I want him to start paralyzing people when he is at half HP.

My conditions are set, so I just need to change the Action from Basic to Skill, and choose Paralyze.

The last part is the Rating. This is the priority of the action. I'll put this at a 6 rating, so that when the condition is met, the enemy will stop attacking and start paralyzing.

Now we have a dynamic enemy! You might be wondering why we didn't have to pick a small sprite for the enemy to appear on the map, and that's because enemies are made as events with their own graphic. Furthermore, those events don't link directly to Enemies, they link to Troops, which are made up of Enemies.