Here is a tutorial I made, tell me what you think.

How to create visible characters in field areas
by GerStud101

This tutorial will show you how to ceate a Earthbound like field map where you can see the enemies, but if you touch them, you go into turnbased battle. The first thing you need to do is chose the map you want. Before you continue, you must make sure that you have a character set similar to one of the monsters in the party. (Note: In earthbound, to run into battle wiht more then one monster, you must hit an enemy, and while the battle is loading, other monster run in and join the monster party at will. In the game you will make using this tutorial, the monsters on the map will represent a monster party of your choice.) Now, after choosing a monster party and correspoding character, you must place an event on the field map. Let us use a monster party of three zombies. In this case, I would have chosen the zombie chracter in monsters1 character set o represent the monster party. Now, creat an event. In the character area, set it to the chosen character. For a zombie enemy, we have chosen the slime character. Set movement type to step toward hero. Set priority level to above. Set event start to common touch (this is important. If it is set to hero touch, the hero will actually have to run into the enenmy. When on common touch, the monster can run into the hero or vise versa.) Movement speed and frequency can be set to whatever you want, to make the enemy quicker and take more frequent steps, or to make it slower and have longer gaps between steps. Animation type is also set to whatever floats your boat. Now move into the event commands area. First you need to add the combat event. Go to start combat. Choose the monster party you want to use. For this example, we will use Zombiex3. Now set the battle BG. For my example, I have put the zombie in a bridge area, so we will use the Bridge background. Go to escape options and change it to independent fo (my game doesnt finish that choice. It is the one farthest to the right). Now go down to victory case. make a change switch event. Now create an event that represents the moster. i chose to make an event called Bridge-Zombie1 (Bridge is the area, and zombie one represents one of the zombie enemies on the map). Now turn the switch on. Now go to Escape Case. This part gets kind of confusing. You want to make a movement event that will flash the enemy character while stopping him from movement. I did this all in one ste character movement event. It looks like this:

<>Wait
<>Change Character Walk GFX to a blank character
<>Wait
<>Change Character Walk GFX back to original GFX (Zombie in thi case)

I repeated this about three times. NOw after making this event, go to crerate new page. Go to event conditions, and go to switch. Set it to the siwtch you created. In this case, I chose the switch called Bridge-Zombie1. Now go to character graphic and change it to the normale balnk chip inthe top left corner of any 2nd layer chipset. everything else doesnt matter as long as the priority level is below chip. The event should look something like this:

- Page one:

<>Strt Combat:Zombiex3, Bridge
:Victory Case
<>Change Switch: [####: bridge-zombie 1]-ON Set
<>
:Escape Case
<>(Place the movement event here)
<>
:End Case
<>
- Page 2:

<>

Now your event is done. Test it out to see how well it performs.

TIPS: If you would like the monsters on a specific map to reapear every time you go back tot hat map, you need to make an event in each teleport event that teleports to the specfic map. It should turn all the enemy switches back off. It is easier to make all the switches in a row. This way you can turn them all off wiht one event. If you want to make the game more realistic, you can create like a dead enemy chracter and use that for the graphic on page 2.

It has been fun. Email me wiht any comments or concerns. My email is GerStud101@aol.com. Happy creating everyone!