On this page I discussed some of the design considerations for making an RPG-style game. One approach is to use CombatLib, a library of types and functions where most of the hard work is done for you. Even a ready-built library is not trivial as there is a lot in it, and this series of pages will walk you through the process.

This is the library used in my own game, Deeper; take a look if you want to see how combat will play out.

1 Introduction

2 Weapons, Shields and Armour

3 Basic Monsters

4 More Options For Monsters

5 Multi Attack Monsters

6 Further Options for Monsters

7 Basic Magic

8 Lasting Spells

9 Instant Spells

10 Magic Items

11 Character Creation

12 Crafting Blade Venoms and Potions

13 Friend or Foe?

Reference

Vancian Magic

Using Power Points

Custom stats

Demo

You will need all the library files as described in Part 1. This includes 20 spells, over 40 weapons and over 100 monsters that you can look at and copy directly into your game. It also has a simple dialogue panel allowing the player to spend points on attributes.

You could even use this as the start of your game - but give it a new Game ID on the Setup tab of the game object (and name and author too!).

If you are building a large RPG-style game, you might also want to look at these libraries:

Conversation Library: Build dynamic conversations for your NPCs.

Quest Library: A way to track quests in Quest.

Second Inventory Pane: Add a second inventory pane to your game (especially useful for spells).

Shop Library: Allow the player to buy and sell goods.

Stack Library: Have items stack in the player's inventory pane.