/agdg/ - Amateur Game Development General

RPG Maker is pretty limiting if you don't know how to code Ruby. To The Moon also got shit on quite a bit for being made in RPG Maker.

Your best bet would be using one of the more modern game making tools that don't require you to code.

Look into Clickteam Fusion, GDevelop, Stencyl or Construct.

Some pretty awesome games can be made with them and you don't need to know any programming language.

>>17352

This. People praised OFF for it's bizarre nature despite being made in RPG maker. It didn't have the most interesting gameplay but everything else was out of the ordinary.

Learn GameMaker or something of the like if you don't want to limit yourself and/or suffer as bad of a stigma. I'm mostly an artist and I'm not having the worst time learning it.

>>17353

What did To the Moon use for it's ports? Some kind of wrapper I was hearing. I know they developed it in RPG Maker XP.

>>21061

>Barkley-Shut-Up-and-Jam-Ga….jpg

I thought that SUAJG was a GameMaker game.

>>17352

>why not Java

Because Java sucks fucking dick. You are 100% right though.

>>21080

iirc, the game started on on RM2003 before being moved over to GameMaker in order to get around the basic design limitations of RM2003 since it lacks native scripting support for custom code.

I'd say the biggest issue for RPG Maker games is that so many people get held up using nothing but the RTP resources and let that become the restrictions of their game. Meanwhile there are those who really abuse what the engine gives you but have the talent to hide the game behind proper art resources (Off, Yume Nikki, Lisa, etc.) or who bend the RTP over their leg and make it work (To the Moon).

There's also a lot of people who don't give the base engine anywhere near enough credit. There's a demo floating around from years ago called "Sacred Tears Episode Zero" that uses little to no custom scripts (entire battle system is evented) and aside from a few dead giveaways in the system is hard to tell it's RPG Maker.

>>21123

>All of these are automatic or drag n drop mostly in rm2003

>fix'd

Also, first time fucking up a spoiler dat feel

RPG maker is actually a pretty good base if you use custom assets and can code Ruby (there are a plethora of scripts online however). If you want, you certainly can make a good RPG.

There have been lots of good games made with RPG makers. Space Funeral, SUAJG (made in RPG maker 2003 then ported to Game Maker Studio), Off, and Yumi Nikki come to mind.

It gets such a bad wrap because it's super easy to make something that works, but not necessarily good. So every thirteen year old and their grandmother use all the gross default anime assets to make a shitty ten-minute game and proceed to post them online. So the good games made by people who take the time and effort to design docs and custom assets are in a sea of garbage. People discard RPG maker games as shit because most of them are shit.

As a general rule, if an RPG maker game uses defaults, it's shit and not worth your time.

I wish Enterbrain wouldn't make a ton of default assets to go with their software. It encourages people to be lazy shits.

t. Been making shit in RPG makers for awhile (that and Game Maker Studio)

>>21123

I've wondered this also. They released the version of the game made in RM2003 and I dug through it for awhile.

It's crazy how similar it is. It's basically the same thing without 4-directional movement, sprint feature, and the battle system. The assets are mostly exactly the same. all the tilesets are identical.

>>17352

The problem is that most RPG Maker games have that "I know it was made in RPG Maker" feel, and it's pretty difficult to wash that off.

Even Yume Nikki looks like it was made in RPG Maker even though almost everything about it was made from scratch... except the menus.

For some reason, all menus and title screens made in RPG Maker look the same. I have yet to see one being used in an actual game (because there are some really nice XP scripts that replace menus, but they just aren't popular) that has been scripted to make them look vastly different.

What I've been doing as of late is testing whether I have the dedication to develop a playable game or not by using RPG Maker VX Ace. Since I'm not intending to use this prototype for sale or anything, I figured I'd learn what I can and see whether I enjoy the strenuous and tedious process of game development, even if what I'm doing currently is relatively easier than building a game from scratch.

For the most part, I've developed a multitude of conditional variables, class specific quests using switches, and a karma system. It's stereotypical modern RPG stuff, but I realized I could make something I would enjoy playing as long as I spent a lot of time creating different quests with compelling objectives and stories.

I've been in writing for about 4 years now, nearly complete a book I've been working on that's really the setting of the Monogatari series slapped with the themes of Evangelion, and while that's not something I want to turn into a game, any form of medium I can tell stories in would really bring joy to me, so that's why I'm using RPG Maker as my "testing grounds" for whether I should go into game development.

>>17353

>>21086

>>21750

>>21773

What do you guys think? I mean, I'm using all of the stock images and textures for the time being (as there hasn't been a visually artistic bone in my body since Middle School) but with compelling story and varied gameplay, I imagine my progress would be a step ahead what you guys were talking about.

I mean, as I read your descriptions of why RM isn't any good (or used poorly) I imagined a game that, for the most part, sticks to a basic battle-system and nothing else.

>>21061

/v/ would have you believe that, yes