is it possible to make a turnbased rpg engine with battle animations kind of like final fantasy 1 and 2 on the gameboy advance with game maker 7 lite.
I was also wondering if it is possible to make random encounters on game maker 7 lite.

Sure, it's possible. Would take quite a long time though.

Thanks for replying. Its nice to know i can to all that with the lite version.
By the way since you said it would take a long time how much do you think i would have to do?

How much would you have to do? Quite a bit lol. I'm going to be attempting it with one of my games (although it's on hold at the moment), and I can tell you it's not something you'll have done in a day. For starters, you need to make the turns in battle, then add battle statistics (how much damage an attack will do can take quite a while longer than you'd think), then start programming skills to do various things while making it all visible to the player. It's a lot of work, but it'll allow a lot of customization. Battle animations can be pretty simple because of Game Maker's animated sprites, but aligning them and showing them can be a horribly frustrating task. Just making the images can take a while, as well.

I'm not trying to scare you away or anything. But if you want to make a quick RPG, I'd suggest using an RPG Maker. It'll save you a LOT of time and aggravation. Using Game Maker for an RPG is more for people who want to customize everything in it and want to stray away from RPG Maker's systems. But it's completely possible with the time and effort.

You'd have to code your own battle system, movement system, window system, etc. The 8 directional movement script I wrote (probably not the kind of movement you'd want for a standard RPG) is about 50 lines long. A simpler, grid-based movement system would no doubt be quicker to code, but still would take a little while.

The battle system would probably be the most difficult part of the project. Turned base battle systems can be a challenge to create effectively, efficiently, and flexibly.

I can't give you a time estimate, because I'm not good at working efficiently. I tend to work for a while, then take a long hiatus, etc. If you worked non-stop you could get it done fairly quickly I suppose.

Thanks for the replies everyone.

Take a look at this. While it may not be a turn-based battle system like you are looking for. It shows off a lot of what you would probably have in your game.
http://www.yoyogames.com/games/show/1066

RPG's are actually really easy to create in Game Maker once you get good at GML, I've had fun creating tons of side view, action based battle systems and it's just fun!

The hardest part is creating the dialog box, but that's easy to create when you know about strings and string_char_at.

I'll be releasing a dialog box script soon with an end marker(for pokemon/standard rpgs), color for important text, and mult dialog support.

I sure you can do it but it takes quite a long time to run. If you are good knowledge in GML then you can create easily RPG in game maker. It is very much fun to create different types of sounds with attractive backgrounds.

It takes a long time to do. If you take your time for it and really want to do it I'm sure you can. But like more people said you need to know a lot of GML. GML isn't very difficult. It look likes Visual Basic a lot and can be easy learned. At yoyogames.com there can be found a lot of tutorials.

But okay, now a plan. If you have no plan to follow you will be stuck within a few weeks and quit. Be sure you got the recources and everything needed to get started.

You should do it like this:
1) Create your RPG System. I mean with this the Database, Battle system, Player, Shops, Npc's, etc. Take a look at RPG Maker if you want to know what to make.

2) Start writing your game in notepad. This an very important step. You should write a story, game characters, features etc. Without this you will quit soon enough.

3) Create your game.

It looks easy now if you see it is in 3 steps. But you will see soon enough it is not easy.
I hope you can do something with it.

Gr
Norkezz

I'm going to say right now a RPG Player Database is freaking difficult to code in Game Maker, if you want to see how it's done I'll be releasing a very early alpha demo showing the menu and the order menu. Anything else will well.. not work.

go to yoyogames, someone has made a good rpg called Ark22, try playing that maybe you can figure out how some of it works. (Although battle is not turn based)