Learning Through Experience

In the past week or so, I have been working with michael_cayer on a project involving a sort of “blue mage” learning system for EarthBound. This would allow for characters to learn abilities by experiencing them firsthand in combat. Michael_cayer fused together some of my ideas with some previous hacking he had done, and this is the result:

As you can see, character 2 now learns abilities through event flags! The first ability is learned when opening a present, while the second is triggered by an enemy attack. The flavor text isn’t really polished at the moment (non-existent for the first learned ability), but the mechanics are fully functional. This has a lot of exciting possibilities!

Thanks go out to michael_cayer for putting this whole thing together for me in ASM. I will do a technical analysis of the whole process on the Starmen.net forums in the near future, for any hackers out there who are interested in duplicating the effect.

11 Comments

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  • Indeed. The snake fights will be a separate storyline within the game – sort of a “man vs nature” power struggle metaphor.

    As the game progresses, Mitchell’s animosity towards the snake will slowly fade away. He will realize that there is no use fighting nature (the snake), and that he should learn to live with it in harmony.

  • I want to have this in Earthbound. So, I really want a patch which makes this possible in EB.

    • Maximus, this actually isn’t too hard to do in the new Coil Snake. I could make a little tutorial if you like. I was planning to for the PK Hackers anyhoo.

      • Oh, that sound very good! That will be a great mod for EB! But do you need to be good with Coilsnake? I always use PKHack. (JHack, actually)

        • A general understanding of Coil Snake would help, but since it is based around text files, you can probably just copy and paste the code I’m making.

          I’ll probably have time to whip up a little tutorial over the next week. I’ll post about it on the blog when I do!

By Michael