Does every of your heroes actually use all 3 different kinds of attacks (Swing, Thrust AND Missile)?
And what about heroes that don’t do well with “normal” weapons anyways?
Roza by default is a priest, and she will be our example today:
As you can see, she would normally use Staffs and Flails, which are not an outlandish choice for a priest itself, but when I look at her with her white garnets and glasses and overall more studious look, I don’t know if I actually see her whacking goblins with a stick.
But what are my other options?
Most weapons seem to need too much strength and practice to be handled by her, as she would rather read a book than try to master a weapon in that time.
We have that magic missile weapon
but what bugs me here is that while it is cool to have her have a cantrip like attack, I also want to be able to give her a weapon.
Some of you now might say “Yeah, you are just too picky”, maybe, but, in fact, there is an easy solution for this.
Since her class by default never uses Thrust or Missile, I can easily replace them and create weapons that are just assigned to her class, so it does not matter only she has those special positions.
In my case, I am going to take out the 3 frames that Roza needs to operate a bow or crossbow, since she will never ever do that anyways.
Now I am totally free to fill them with whatever I want and that of course depends a lot on what I - or you, if you want to - actually want.
Depending on your own skill you could create a whole new pose and everything, but that is something quite advanced. But! We are very lucky. Look at all those different poses on this sheet! There must be something we can use…
Let us say, Roza will attack using magical orbs she can equip. They are like crystal balls, and she kinda channels their magic as her way to harm the enemy.
Now if we look at the sheet, there are actually several options we have which we could use as a base:
Both “magical skill” and “item use”, could be used to “pull out” an orb and have it do its thing.
Which we pick is up to us, but since I can use it better to illustrate some important things, I am going with the “magical attack” here.
My quick sketch with the orb of the right size and placement is already the temple we need to create our “orb weapon” prototype:
And just there, on the Inside_C tileset, we have a neat crystal ball we could use here:
Of course this is not the case for other outlandish weapon ideas you might have, but in many cases you will find something you can misuse as base if you are struggling to create it from scratch!
We keep our movement cycle on a background layer and have a separate layer for the weapon, and there we can replace our template with the actual thing:
This already looks pretty neat, but with some actual animation it would be a lot cooler!
A first way to establish some magic is happening could be to have the second frame glow, by changing saturation, contrast and brightness of that frame till you are happy with the result:
And even if she does not swing the orb actually at the enemy, she swings it around, so additional movement blur as the swing weapons have would be suitable here as well.
Other ways to indicate something is happening could be magical flares, sparkles, …
Here we have two of those possibilities, with Roza and an all black background behind, so we can fully see how the effect would look like:
They both already look very useful, but there is a huge problem if you are not using a special plugin for this - and I am not aware of one - the weapon is drawn below the character in the engine. So despite me creating this orb on an upper layer, it will not be displayed in that way.
To get the right SV battler and weapon, you now have to swap the layers and use the eraser tool very carefully!
Afterwards your layer of your hero - in my case here Roza - has holes just where we want the orbs and the sparkles to be. Be careful to not take away too many fingers, your heroes need to hold the stuff in some way ;D
Also, you might end up having to tweak things a little to work as you want, I got lucky here that the finger placement worked out as is!
Now all you have to do is to implement your result.
Bring your hero from the 96x64 grid back to the default 64x64 SV battler grid and paste them into the attack row you want to swap out - in my case, still missile.
Plus, now you set up the orb as a new weapon animation in the database, as in the previous tutorial.
Since she can only use orbs, I added a recolor here as well, so she can have a more special one in the endgame.
Something that is very important: Since you virtually punch holes into the character, this does not give you a lot of flexibility in size and all the sparkles for different weapons would have to be in JUST the same place.
But what if I want to have one orb have the motion blur and the other sparkles and maybe one with flames?
Well.
Is there really only that one character in your party that uses orbs?
Yes?
Then…
We simply punch out the missile animation from Roza’s sheet.
And make her AND the orb combined her weapon:
Plus: It would actually allow her to switch between an orb and a bow as a weapon, as you could also “hardcode” her with a bow animation.
Minus: This gets complicated very quickly if multiple characters can equip the same weapon, so I would only recommend it to use for weapons that are unique to one hero in your party!