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EasyRPG

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Does RPGMaker have an onerous cost associated with using it? Or has it fallen stale and become unmaintained? I've never fooled around with it, so I can't personally say.

I'm all for writing open-source tools, but the real contribution of RPGMaker is surely not its source, but the easy design interface that its creators invented to make RPGs.

Hopefully the EasyRPG folks have some real innovation to pull EasyRPG away from RPGMaker in some nice way, and all that they clone is the file format used.

I've only ever fooled around with RPGMaker; I've never spent a great deal of time with it. But the biggest issue is probably that it's a product of its time, and that was a time long before iOS and Android. RPGMaker executables can be ported to mobile platforms, but the process is wonky, and the total addressable gaming base is very small.

And in a lot of ways, the audience was always small, even in RPGMaker's prime. To me, that was the biggest setback. If I was going to pour 100+ hours into making a game, I would have wanted people to play it. Preferably, a lot of people, but even some would have been fine. That just never seemed to be a likely possibility.

In theory, this project will make RPGMaker games more easily playable on all platforms, and thus more accessible. So that's a worthy goal. I don't think you'd be able to make modern games on RPGMaker 2000/3. But you could make a respectable, if rustic take on the 16-bit-era RPG. And maybe you could find a small, but passionate userbase for it.

I wouldn't labor with RPGMaker under the assumption that you're building the Next Big Game. But if you're doing it to make passion projects or hobby games? Sure.

>And in a lot of ways, the audience was always small, even in RPGMaker's prime. To me, that was the biggest setback. If I was going to pour 100+ hours into making a game, I would have wanted people to play it. Preferably, a lot of people, but even some would have been fine. That just never seemed to be a likely possibility.

That is no longer true, people even make money selling RPGMaker games (e.g. the Aveyond series [1]). RPGMaker(-style) games are an established "casual games" genre these days. You know mostly aiming for the same market and sold at the same sites [2] as Hidden Object, Match-3, etc. games i.e. the audience is mostly female. If you want to try a modern RPGMaker (VX) game I can recommend Skyborn [2].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aveyond_series

[2] http://www.bigfishgames.com/download-games/17974/skyborn/ind...

Isn't To The Moon also made in RPG Maker? That's a fairly high-profile indie game.

Yes it is, but it firmly avoid being an "rpg", instead using it as a story-telling platform.

I'm pretty convinced that the few games making money have a limited life expectancy even there. The Aveyond games are crap compared to pretty much any indie game you care to look at and I think they only had the success they did because they sort of came out before the indie scene was a thing. (Any game that feels the need to highlight "HUMOR!" in their Steam page description is a game that is not funny.)

Games like To the Moon and Always Sometimes Monsters have a place, because they don't try to be RPGs (but rather, games just happening to use RPG Maker), but they're few and far between. The "RPG feel" of RPG Maker games pretty much sucks, and there's not a lot you can do to fix that. Skyborn tries, but it still feels-like-an-RPG-Maker-game. I think the future of these is more bespoke titles, like what Zeboyd does (or what I'm--slowly--doing, shameless plug).

>I'm pretty convinced that the few games making money have a limited life expectancy even there.

They have made money for more than half a decade and new games are released and sold all the time. Dig through the site I linked (Big Fish, which is Steam For Women basically), they have a massive collection with many recent releases. The creator of Aveyond (a truly rare beast: a female game developer!) does not seem to suffer from a lack of business either [1].

>The Aveyond games are crap compared to pretty much any indie game you care to look at

Matter of taste issue. Based on the way you express yourself I guess you are a young male.. you are not the target audience. These games are beloved by their fans.

[1] http://www.amaranthgames.com

Thanks for the contemptuous dismissal, but I've been studying games for quite a while and can divorce what I like from what's actually good; I like bad games (I'll play EA's NHL travesties until the cows come home) and dislike good games (I can't get into Spelunky to save my life). The key here, and what you so defensively fail to realize, is that it's completely possible to figure out what's a technically decent game independent of one's own tastes and the majority of commercial RPG Maker releases--Aveyond very, very much included--are bad.

Seriously, go play the field. I have, because I'm making a JRPG, and I find the field lame as hell. Bad UX (how many menus must you click through to do anything? WHY?), mediocre assets (lots of art is expensive, but good art is manageable), and gameplay that is hindered by--wait for it--being in RPG Maker. RPG Maker in all its incarnations has limited ways to interact with the core mechanics. You can't rip out the worst parts of it. You can't fix it (and this is why the good ones, like To the Moon and Always Sometimes Monsters, treat it as a walk-around visual novel instead of an RPG engine). The ability to avoid these limitations is why EasyRPG may have a chance, but I tend to think the overwhelming sameyness of titles using a limited engine will keep them at very-niche status.

And female game developers are honestly not that rare anymore if you pay attention to the indie scene. Before my latest Twitter purge I probably followed around thirty out of a gamedev list of a hundred and thirty or so. It's cool.

There are a few good looking RPG Maker games out there. For example, this game (帽子世界〜A Little World〜) was made in RPG Maker VX Ace: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-daU4t0Un8

The dev has even made it free (although it’s in Japanese).

The dev’s (えぬ, romanized as 'Enu') website is here: http://rpgex.sakura.ne.jp/home/

The site for the game is here: http://rpgex.sakura.ne.jp/littleworld/index.html

Also, if you’d rather not watch a video, the same person who uploaded the linked video also wrote a review (with screenshots) on their blog: http://otakuoverdrive.com/2014/05/25/game-review-boushi-seka...

Sure, there are definitely a few. I dig Always Sometimes Monsters's use of the aesthetic. But for the most part, they're pretty grim.

I'm not so sure this is a problem with RPG Maker though. The majority of indie games don't make much money and have a limited life, no matter what game engine they're made with. Know what I mean?

The win of an open source "game making" tool is surely not the low cost, but having access to the source and enabling modifications and porting to different platforms.

The core of RPG Maker is closed source, but a surprising amount of it is written in user accessible Ruby.

As I understand it, this is not true of RPG Maker 2000/2003 (which is what EasyRPG is attempting to target). Ruby support was introduced starting in RPG Maker XP, which was released after 2003.

See mkxp (https://github.com/Ancurio/mkxp), an open-source replacement for the RPGMaker engine that was used by "To The Moon" for Linux/Mac support.

I like the idea of a RPG IDE, but I would prefer to make a game using js.

Does anyone have a recommendation (and/or example source) for an RPG game built with one of the js game frameworks? I have a really cool project in mind, but every time I get started I end up with choice anxiety about which framework to use. So far I've tried melon.js and crafty.js and both worked OK, though they are not specifically written for RPGs so I didn't have good examples to start from.

Construct 2 is an excellent tool for building 2d games, and I'm sure you could create a decent RPG through Construct 2 - and have it work across many platforms.

As far as I remember RPG Maker developed its own scripting language (not sure in which version, I lost track around 2003).

You can write scripts in Ruby since RPG Maker XP.

Oh, ok. In that time name "Ruby" was something exotic to me :)

Perhaps it's also worth mentioning mkxp in this thread: https://github.com/Ancurio/mkxp

mkxp is an open source cross-platform runtime engine for RPGMaker games and supports games made with RPGMaker VX. This is the engine they used to make "To The Moon" platform independent. From what I've read it's pretty easy to move games over to mkxp, but you have to be very careful not to use any RPGMaker-licensed assets in your game even if they are royalty-free because they're only licensed for distribution with the genuine RPGMaker engine.

Does anyone have a list of GOOD RPGS that have been created by RPGMaker? The only one that I know about is "To the Moon".

Tools like this are great in theory, but the actual worth is 100% dependent on the quality of the created games.

To the Moon, Always Sometimes Monsters, and Barkley Shut Up and Jam Gaiden are the only ones I'd personally bother with (and the latter just because it's genuinely funny). The bar in that community is pretty low.

OFF (http://offgame.wikia.com/) and Yume Nikki (http://yumenikki.wikia.com/) are good examples of things you can do with RPG Maker where the result isn't usually called "an RPG Maker game" (or "an RPG", for that matter.)

Seconding Yume Nikki. Wikipedia has a better summary:

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

As far as I can remember I played Vampires Dawn (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampires_Dawn) and liked it back then. One of the games is also available in English.

I never played through Polymorphous Perversity but I think it's also a good RPGMaker example.

Luke Watcholz' 'The Way' series is, in my opinion, not only the best RPG Maker game, but one of the best RPGs out there, period. And I played a lot of the SNES classics a teenager.

http://www.crestfallen.us/download.html

The world of the way is not a sphere or a disk, but a singular path. All humans are nomadic wanderers who travel the Way, though some choose to settle down and build towns and cities; however, the 'rolling mists' eventually come crashing down on stragglers. The protagonist, Rhue, at first appears to fit some standard RPG tropes (he has amnesia and is looking for his lost girlfriend), but as the series progresses, more and more layers of mysteries are revealed.

I think the fact the game was mostly created by one guy gives the story a creative coherence you don't quite find even in FFVI or Chrono Trigger.

Legion Saga was the best series (3 games) I've ever seen during my RM2k times. Official site is dead, but you can find some sites where it's available.

Sunset Over Imdahl is one of the best RPGMaker games, in my opinion. Despite being short, it has a solid story. It also does an amazing job breaking away from the traditional tile-based look of all the other RPGMaker games.

Man, I'd spend days coding up RPGs with RPGMaker when I was a kid. I hope this project is successful.

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