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RPG in a Box

rpginabox.com

317 pointsskibz77 comments

Five megabytes for the acorn64 rotating box, because it’s a GIF. And a bad GIF that can’t play at its intended speed for most of its rotation, and so has speed jitters (without delving: I presume it’s due to format limitations, as it looks to be using more than 256 colours; see also https://www.biphelps.com/blog/The-Fastest-GIF-Does-Not-Exist). Ugh. `ffmpeg -i acorn64.gif acorn64.mp4` shrinks it to under 350kB, looking about the same except that it now plays smoothly. And will use a lot less power.

(I noticed this because the page was loading unreasonably slowly for unclear reasons. In cases like this, a GIF <img> has a worse failure mode than <video>.)

We humans are story telling species. RPG in Box is what got my 12 year old son interested in programing. Not python. Not AI. My son wants to tell stories and let others experience his stories. Programing is just a means to an end.

When I give short talks at schools about game dev I try to make it super clear that we are all born game designers. We all make up games as children and a large part of that is story telling.

Every child has seen a face in a cloud and 'designed' something outside of themselves. This is where teachers are amazing. Teachers know how to nurture that against the pressure of society crushing it.

It was python+pygame that got one of my kids to learn to program and minecraft modding that got another to learn. Neither code now but that wasn't the point.

"Every child has seen a face in a cloud and 'designed' something outside of themselves. This is where teachers are amazing."

Hm. My teachers rather stopped me from looking outside the window to see faces in the clouds and placed me on a seat far away from any window so I could fully focus on the less interesting topics at hand, that society demands that I know. (Yet when I was succesfully done with all that schools, I found that I learned very little of practical value from my higher education anyway)

There is a middle school in my town that was built with no windows, in the 1970s. For this innovation, it won a design award. The roof leaks terribly.

Sounds like Smithsburg Middle School in Maryland.

A few years ago I took a class of middle schoolers through a simple game dev course and rarely have I seen a group of kids so motivated. Using microStudio[1] they built the story, art, music, gameplay, and levels - I only helped a bit with the code. They kept asking about it long afterwards, so I eventually threw it up on a static site: http://uprag.quest (warning - flashy jump scares)

[1] https://microstudio.dev

I think humans can have different motivations. For your son, it seems to be this.

When I was 12, I originally wanted to make video games, but found that I just loved building things and felt like programming was a magical toolbox. For me, it's not a means to an end, but the journey I actually like - I'm a builder, not a storyteller.

My first thought on seeing the RPG in a Box homepage is that the graphics don't really do anything for me. Maybe it's just nostalgia having grown up playing Final Fantasy games for SNES, but when it comes to graphically simple games, I find that pixel art graphics resonate much more with me. So I would probably lean more toward RPG maker if I wanted to make an RPG.

But then I had a look at the community showcase [1], and it's really impressive what people are doing. I've played a lot of Minecraft, and have experienced genuine awe and terror in those environments. And some of the community showcase screenshots definitely give me that same immersive feeling that I get in Minecraft, and which pixel art games don't really offer.

I just had a look in the forums and it looks like you can do pixel art games in this engine, too. [2]

So I guess my advice is to maybe highlight more of the community creations on the homepage as well as first-person worlds.

Anyway, any tool that encourages and enables creativity is awesome. This is very cool!

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/rpginabox/comments/1hqx3h4/im_so_gr...

[2] https://rpginabox.com/forum/d/547-the-twilight-isle/8

>So I would probably lean more toward RPG maker if I wanted to make an RPG

That may be a part of why they chose to take a 3d approach instead. RPG Maker has 20 years of iteration, so it's pretty hard to compete in that space. It's already a bit difficult as is to stand out in a 2D space to begin with.

Meanwhile, 3D is still a hard problem and Voxels give that flexibility to make assets by hand that fit into an overall game.

Hey, developer of RPG Playground here, and I agree with you.

My platform has moderate success (multiple games released each day), but to compete with RPG Maker means being 10x better. I was hoping to grab some of that market, but marketing wise it's incredibly difficult.

Blender had moderate success when it was closed source, but not enough to pay its development, so it was going to die.

After its creator raised €100,000 to release it under the GPL, Blender became the leading open-source 3D tool it is today.

And they make enough money from recurring donations, service subscriptions, merchandise, conferences and trainings.

Blender is great, I also use it. It's a nice example on how a non-developer tool is successful with open source.

There are/were plenty of open source RPG makers, but they never gained any real traction.

I considered open sourcing my product in the past (did so with a previous game), so maybe one day. I still have some big things planned :).

I think Blender was (and still is) exceptionally good at community building. Just freeing your product might not get you enough traction by itself.

Clearly you are unfamiliar with the process. Step 1, open source project. Step 2. Step 3, profit.

* Step 1: Ask for $100,000 to fund the start-up

* Step 2: Open source project

* Step 3: Find other streams of revenue (donations, grants, subscriptions, sponsorships)

>Just freeing your product might not get you enough traction by itself.

Plus not everyone wants to give their product away. I see that advice all the time here and reddit and other places, "just opensource it" as if that's a solution to every problem a creator might have. I even saw it on a gamedev subreddit where a guy was asking how to make more money and people were saying to make it opensource, as if making it free would somehow increase sales for him.

Blender itself is also over 20 years old. And it struggled a lot even when opt source until several things came together at once. A mix of a UX overhaul, autodesk pissing off the community, and outreach yielding fruit as corporations experimented with adoption.

I'm not sure if we had that perfect storm in game engines yet. Unity fumbled big time, but Godot wasn't quite mature enough to fully take advantage of that opportunity.

I guess the showcase is all stills mainly because it's a collection of screenshots shared on the forum, but I really would like to see the engine in motion! I'm not demanding great animation or anything. I get that individual passion projects are limited in their time and energy budget, and he voxel graphics editor looks intentionally minimalistic. But it would still feel more alive.

There’s a new generation that played Minecraft when they where kids, so a new generation of nostalgia ;)

You'll probably love [TIC-80](https://tic80.com/).

> it's just nostalgia having grown up playing Final Fantasy games for SNES

What did Nintendo do to you people? I've grown up playing very pixelated games on the ZX Spectrum but I have zero nostalgia for those graphics.

It’s because the art for these games was so good, it didn’t feel like the hardware was a limitation, more like it just had a particular style.

I’m currently playing Octopath Traveler 2 and it completely recreates this feeling, the art is beautiful and very pixelated.

Well, at least the Nintendo nostalgia is saving me money since I can't even look at fake pixelated graphics when I look for new indie games to play.

This is not the only way to do low budget graphics. Too bad very few creators realize it.

What are some other techniques you’ve noticed?

Final Fantasy IV and VI, Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, Ogre Battle, and Zelda: A Link to the Past all still look great to me to this day. I think it's just a timeless art style. And it's not all just nostalgia, the early 3d games which came in the next generation of consoles, and which I probably spent even more time playing, all look like trash to me.

The community showcase makes it look all over the place and hard to understand what it is (is it just another engine?). I love the current graphics on the homepage though. I'm also sure it's a good choice for their target audience who probably knows RPG Maker but want to make it 3D, which is in fact nostalgic since they probably grew up with Minecraft etc.

This is built on Godot: https://godotengine.org/showcase/rpg-in-a-box/

By looking at the screenshots I thought this looks a lot like Godot. So there is my answer ;)

It looks like it's mostly self-contained and it doesn't seem to have a clear way to leverage Godot, which is a pity. It uses it's own script language, own resources, etc. It'd be really interesting to have something like this, and have full access to Godot, use shaders, custom nodes, plugins like LimboAI, Beehave, etc.

If it's a Godot "game" then it should be pretty easy to mod that kinda stuff in, there are plenty of tools to do so.

They do provide ability for users to export the project as Godot 4 if needed.

RPG in a Box: A grid-based, voxel-style game engine built on Godot - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37502218 - Sept 2023 (21 comments)

Inventing your own programming language for your personal project is a TERRIBLE idea, and will likely doom the project in the long run.

Languages require a huge amount of support, and you're going to be way too busy building an RPG maker to properly support a whole language. That means you're just going to wind up with a shitty unsupported custom language no one wants or knows how to use.

Wouldn't Lua be the classic/obvious choice for this application since it has such inertia [1]? I remember RPG Maker supporting Ruby back in the day but a lot has changed in the past 20 years...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lua_(programming_lang...

In a better universe Godot went with Lua instead of GDScript.

They actually started with Lua! They made GDScript due to https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/about/faq.html#what-w...

Terrible idea how so? You just said it's a personal project. What's the harm in learning and doing what you want? :)

> Inventing your own programming language for your personal project is a TERRIBLE idea, and will likely doom the project in the long run.

It's something that everyone should do at least once, ideally on a hobby project where it wouldn't be that hard to rip it back out if needed.

Seeing stuff like this makes me so excited! Partly because I love game engines and making games, and partly because it becomes more evidence to me that programmers will really like my project when I finally release it! Hopefully next Monday!

If the author is here:

> It's similar to some other languages, like Lua, and is very easy to pick up if you have knowledge of basic programming concepts.

Why not just use Lua or one of the forks like Luau?

I'd thought they would keep GDScript since it's built on Godot, especially since you can export your projects to Godot afterwards. Not really that bad of a problem since GDScript's easy to pick up

Looks like a really nice and polished project!

A note to the author -- if you ever considered going open source, you could use the same strategy used by Ton Roosendaal to open source Blender:

In July 2002, Ton launched a campaign called "Free Blender" to raise money (100,000 EUR) directly from the community. To everyone's surprise and delight the campaign reached the goal in only seven short weeks.

In October 2002, Blender was released under the GNU GPL. Roosendaal created the Blender Foundation to manage development, and the project kept growing from there. Today, Blender is one of the most popular 3D creation tools, used by professionals, hobbyists, and even studios.

Being free and open source allowed Blender to power countless creative projects, including the 2025 Oscar-winning film Flow.

This would've been much harder if the tool had stayed behind a paywall.

This is a great comment. It's notable that this is a possible path to mutual success.

But on the other hand, $100k seems like quite a small one-time payout for a huge amount (obviously years) of effort, unless someone has exhausted all other plans to continue trying to compete with established software by commercializing their project.

Yes, $100K was a relatively small sum -- but the company that owned the rights was going bankrupt, and Blender was going to die.

For a lucrative game, a reasonable value would be 2 to 4 years of earnings.

For example: if the product makes $10K/month:

    $10k × 36 (a mid-range multiple) = $360,000

With this amount, the author would have at least 3 years of headway, with a much larger open source community.

>In July 2002, Ton launched a campaign called "Free Blender" to raise money (100,000 EUR) directly from the community. To everyone's surprise and delight the campaign reached the goal in only seven short weeks.

Seems like he should have set a higher goal.

This is not a rocket propelled grenade startup

Thanks, the title had me confused.

Same, got a little excited at first

I honestly feel bad for anyone primarily associating RPG with weapons and not the beautiful world of role-playing games. You're missing out.

Have you ever shot an RPG? You’re missing out.

don't most RPGs have weapons?

And they don't put stuff in boxes either! What an enormous clickbait.

I'm more surprised nobody's brought up RPG, the classic ptogramming language (which, like COBOL, isn't as dead as you might think)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_RPG

When I saw the headline I was definitely hoping for some fun new tool for the IBMi server I maintain, but I knew the chances were slim :)

This looks a lot like Godot to me. So I would rather go with Godot instead. But nevertheless this looks like an awesome tool, less friction for creating story driven games is a good thing. Maybe I give it a try.

No open source, no fun

Yes especially when it is build on free and open source software. Of course they don't have to, but it is always better.

As a user I wont dedicate myself to a software, the community can't fork. Like the enshitiffication risk is far to high.

Linux is free and open source software. Should everything built on Linux be free?

gcc is free and open source software. Should everything compiled with gcc be free?

apache is free and open source software. Should every website be noncommercial?

>Linux is free and open source software. Should everything built on Linux be free?

Yes.

>gcc is free and open source software. Should everything compiled with gcc be free?

Yes.

>apache is free and open source software. Should every website be noncommercial?

Yes.

Well, I suppose that's a philosophy!

Say what you want about the tenets of Free Software, dude. At least it's an ethos.

* this is a movie reference please don't come for me

I’m very happy that there are modern equivalents to Adventure Construction Set! Seems like that idea was lost for decades.

I wonder how it compares to RPGMaker.

Here I was thinking they were going to talk about rocket propelled grenades in a box.

Hugged to death, it looks like

i bought this software on steam awhile ago. i had fun messing around with it

I was expecting a creative solution for shipping rocket propelled grenades. I am sorely disappointed.

You can use it to design a game where rocket propelled grenades fall in love, if that's any consolation.

Uh is this a AI thing?

Clicked expecting some sort of 3d printed rocket-propelled grenade launcher.

TFA is not that.

They should take advantage of viral marketing: "I heard you like game engines, so here's a game engine in a game engine."

Sorry to be the one to tell you, but that meme is at this point older than many gamers themselves.

2004(!)

I'm having a very rewarding experience doing this mostly from scratch in Gamemaker using Claude.

When I see apps like this, I get the fear that it has those RPG maker vibes where all the games will be same-y. That Roblox / minecraft kind of lack of uniqueness that makes for a great mod-game, but it always harkens back to the same patterns you use in the game engine that start to bother gamers like me.

I'm working on a pixel RPG in gamemaker right now, using Claude as help, and I've developed a reasonably complex classic pixel RPG in less than a few weeks. I still had to constantly correct claude, but it was more often 10 steps forward and one step back. My whole engine and experience is mostly done, and now it's the fun part of designing the world.

I almost have an entire sheet of custom sprites I plan on offering as well.

I wouldn't trade my experience for some out of the box thing where I don't own a lot of the game's core content.

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