Battle screen help. Options

[SpringHeelMark]

Hello old friends, (Been here like 7 years I think, just under different names.. I forget my passwords and old emails if I don't come here for a while)

ANYwho, I'm working on my first major release, It's an old school RPG for mobile devices.

Basically I've encountered a problem. I don't want to go with the transitional transition to battle screen with a nice background matching the 'tileset'. Well in all honesty I do, but I'm running low on funds. What I'm thinking would be a good idea as a replacement for the transition to a battle background, is to have the enemies fade in on the left side of the screen, then have the hero jump to the right side of the screen thus commencing the battle. He would jump back to the center after the battle restoring control to the player.

As you can probably imagine though, this looks awkward just on top of the map (enemies might appear on the left side of the screen on top of trees and what not). I was wondering if you guys had any ideas to throw my way? Maybe a circular gradient that blackens all but a circle making it look like a little stadium? I have no idea. I can't really think of any game that uses a system like this that I can draw inspiration from.

Are there any games that have a style that does not utilize battle backgrounds, but rather effects applied to the level?

Also this obviously isn't made using an RPG maker engine, I just thought a place filled with nice people who are interested in old school RPG games would be perfect.

Thanks guys, hope I was clear,
Mark

[Shaddow]

Well he's not actually using an rpg maker from what I read there, but Saint's system is really good, I messed around with it for a bit when I was helping out on Kingdom 2, and I really found it fun. Enemies do not have to be there visible, but they need to have an event set up for them, and you'll have to have a trigger event too, so it's still a lot of work and 'random' encounters won't exist.