QBASIC RPG - Battle Engine Help
Okay, I'm writing an RPG. I have a simple tile engine I wrote myself. The tiles are 15x13, and the tiles are based upon an 20x20 screen map. There is no scrolling other than screen-by-screen. All graphics are in data statements because I can't seem to get BSAVE to work correctly with all this. So currently, the game appears to have a high memory usage...but I'll figure it all out soon enough.
Anyways, my question: how would I go about implementing a battle engine? Currently, after all the tiles/bitmaps are drawn to the screen and the world is loaded, a loop begins checking for keystrokes for movement. So far, what comes to mind is a SUB/GOSUB at the start of the loop.
Pseudocode:
LOOP
gosub checkstatus
[movement stuff]
END LOOP
checkstatus:
check health
if 0 then reset to starting screen
else check for enemy encounter
CONFUSION STARTS HERE
return
So, does that seem correct so far? I'm not sure how to check for enemy encounters. I have two ideas....something like Pokemon Red where enemies randomly appear, or something like Zelda: Link's Awakening where the enemies are apparent on the screen. Doing something like Zelda seems more difficult because I'd have to draw each monster, determine preset paths, and check coordinates for encounters....correct?
Okay, so yea...suggestions/comments are appreciated. Also, will someone point me to what they think is one of the best graphics tutorials? I want to have tiles that look a little better, have them animated, and have those half-tiles that can be half-grass and half-dirt and such...i believe it had something to do with the pages.