Nice to meet you MonchoMeechu!
First of all I'm going to assume there are many characters in your game, maybe a hero and several monsters. So if we're going to make lots of entities that use similar data, its a good idea to store them all in one array. This array will act as a kind of database for the program, we'll simply reference the data we need, as we need it.
Now we've decided how we'll store the data, let's think about what kind of attributes we want and how they will be used. We want a range of fighters, ones that are big and strong but slow, and ones that are small and fast but weak, and others in between the two extremes. Strength, speed and hit-points would be good attributes.
Let's write the array.
dim fighter(3,2)
rem fighter(x,n), when n=... 0 HP, 1 Strength, 2 Speed.
rem data to be read into array
data 80,14,5, 50,9,11, 24,7,16, 48,12,8
rem read data to array
for i = 0 to 3
for att = 0 to 2
read fighter(i,att)
next att
next i
There are only four characters at the moment, but all characters would be stored in this array including the player character.
We're missing one important piece of data! The names! We can't store them in the same array because the array is of integer type and so can only store integers. We must make a separate string array to store the names.
dim name$(3)
dim fighter(3,2)
rem fighter(x,n), when n=... 0 HP, 1 Strength, 2 Speed.
rem data to be read into array
data "Boulder",80,14,5, "Sparks",50,9,11, "Viper",24,7,16, "Onix",48,12,8
rem read data to array
for i = 0 to 3
read name$(i)
for att = 0 to 2
read fighter(i,att)
next att
next i
Notice how although we need two arrays to store the data, the data command can hold data of any type! DATA is a great way to hold pre-defined data in your programs, the trouble is that the data they hold must be read sequentially and you have to reset the pointer to get to previous data. That's why we transfer the data to arrays, because we can access any element of data by referencing its index number/s, also arrays are writeable during run time whereas data lines are not.
I'm dozing off here, need a nap... I will come back and finish this later.