Special thanks go to AstralEsper for their excellent game-mechanics document.
This project wouldn't have been possible without your written contributions and explanations.
You're also credited incorrectly in the current build in the credits by your email address - sorry bout that.

This is the first in a series of post-mortems on Memeal Mantasy Wun, now that the project is officially slowing down to maintenance.  The first thing I said I was going to talk about was the elephant in the room - what was left on the checklist, and one thing I left off of the checklist ahead of time.

• Monster Attack Order

The monsters in 1987 attack in a very particular order, and that order itself was actually fairly easy to do if a monster had all physical attacks or all magical attacks.  In 1987, there were odds attached to physical and magical attacks.

Monsters would roll a random chance of X/128 to determine if they were going to do a physical attack, and the same goes for magic.  Once that number was selected, the appropriate move in the list order would be used.  RPG Maker MZ, for whatever reason, only allows one condition to be true at a time - so I couldn't figure out a way to order both attack lists at the same time.  And while I could have fudged it to make it as close as possible, there are certain places (like CHAOS) where that would not fly.  The CUR4 spell fires consistently in the spell list, letting speedrunners and enthusiasts know exactly when it is coming and what their odds are for success.

All in all, this was a minor disappointment, albeit a major change.  FINAL SCORE: 7/10 annoyance

• Player Escape Mechanics

What a complete mess.  What an absolute debacle.  I ended up using it until I had a chance to look at the intended formula that the developers wanted, which is:

Runner's Luck > random number from 0 to 15 + Runner's Level

Luck is a total mess, to begin with, and one of the major reasons why the Thief was by far objectively the worst character class in 1987.  Luck is bugged all over the place, but it's not actually Luck's fault.  It's the unintended mistakes in the code that lead to the real problem.  Wun uses the above script to make it work, but here is what I wanted to use... it is way worse:

Runner 1's Luck > random number from 0 to 15 + Player 3's status marker
Runner 2's Luck > random number from 0 to 15 + Player 4's status marker

This actually wouldn't have been difficult to implement.  When a player is affected by a status, the game assigns them a number: 0 for normal, 16 for poison, 32 for petrify, and 64 for dead.  So, if Player 3 is alive and well, and Runner 1 has 15 Luck if the battle is escapable, running is always successful.  The same goes with Players 4 and 2, respectively.  Where the problem comes in is Player 4, and to a GREAT extent, Player 3.

Runner 3's Luck > random number from 0 to 15 + the ID number of the third entity to attack (which would require reordering my list)
Runner 4's Luck > random number from 0 to 15 + a number determined by the one's digit of Player 4's HP.

I have no means of determining turn order ahead of time in this engine.  If I threw myself at the wall long enough, I might be able to brute-force the code to let me select when entities attack when, but there's not enough documentation on the RPG Maker MZ engine to really help me to do that, and I don't want to deal with paying for another plug-in (more on that later).  I had one on-looker suggest using some junk data from something else to simulate it, and I considered that for a while but ultimately decided that that would have been cheating.

There's more to the story, also.  Depending on the information passed to runners 3 and 4, it isn't a 1 to 1 declaration.  The one's digit in Player 4's HP isn't what's passed - that's a marker to a number from 128 to 137, which ultimately means that Runner 4 will need at least 128 Luck to ever succeed running if I am reading the information correctly.

What a disappointment.  FINAL SCORE: 9/10 annoyance

• Only Three Spells per Level

I stressed about this for a few months when I was first starting the project back in mid-2020 but ultimately decided that if push came to shove, I would drop this one early.  Characters are able to buy all four spells per level if they are able.  Red Magic, in particular, lucks out because they can potentially learn eight spells for a single spell level.

Considering many of the spells in 1987 are junk, and experienced players never buy all of them anyway, I was not terribly concerned.

HOWEVER, should one of the plug-ins surrounding magic allow me to quickly and easily implement this change, I will make that change in a heartbeat.  FINAL SCORE: 2/10 annoyance


NEXT TIME: Physical damage calculations and all their glory.  I'll include quite a bit of my jank, totally amateur but working javascript.  Get ready to read.