Old RPG Makers

How did people even learn how to use old editions of RPG Maker (RPG Maker 2000, 2003, XP)? Games like Oneshot, OFF, Yume Nikki etc. are outstanding usages of the engine yet there are almost no tutorials for them online at all.

>>37564 You'd register on the forum, make a thread asking how to do something, a bunch of people would tell you to kill yourself for not using the forum search feature first, then you'd make a new account to hide your shame and use it to read all the soykafty user posted guides. Then when you're caught up, you'd read the release notes and discuss new features. Also soykafty youtube videos (or videos on random file-sharing sites pre-youtube) where someone uses unregistered hypercam to record themselves typing instructions into notepad while a system of a down song plays.

Search engines dont work anymore so you just cant find them. Also there is likely more tutorials written in Japanese than English.

>>37566 This is still what using Adobe Illustrator is like in 2023.

>>37564 What >>37566 said. In case you asked this because you need actual help, check out some Nikki/RPGMAKER game jams. It's plausible that there are devlogs or like blogs of people trying to get into it (should help in getting acquainted with it and no more) Also 4/vg/agdg *maybe* has some links, use archive.

>>37564 >lack of tutorials It used to be that we didn't rely on tutorials, but figured things out for ourselves. I know this will likely be an unpopular thing to say but tutorials have been a major problem with all forms of development and programming and created some serious messes for all of humanity over the last 20 years. >lack of documentation Working with a black box isn't too difficult. Exploration is what most people would do / did, then they would create documentation for themselves. Have you ever wondered how people came up with those "tips and tricks"? That's how. I hope that was helpful information, lainon.

>>37598 >I know this will likely be an unpopular thing to say but tutorials have been a major problem with all forms of development and programming and created some serious messes for all of humanity over the last 20 years. Tutorials are okay if they're for very basic, very general things, like how to make a cutscene, or how to modify menus. It's useful to have someone explain the basic building blocks to you, because once you understand them you can do basically anything else on your own. >Working with a black box isn't too difficult It's not, but it is. To actually understand why X happens when you do Y, beyond the literal fact that it happens, can be very time consuming.

>>37598 >Working with a black box isn't too difficult. It's time-consuming, often unnecessarily so. It also depends a lot how much a "black box" something is. If you have a CPU with no datasheet it's basically useless.

>>37598 Software used to be designed better though, to be usable and approachable by a beginner, with clear actions available to the user which had quick, informative, and sensible responses Now software is broken out of the box and requires extensive documentation or tutorials just to get it to do what its meant to without breaking. So tutorials are required nowdays to make broken software usable, and tutorials are expected nowdays as no one thinks software could possibly be simple or just work. In fact lots of people have lost the ability to independently learn how software works as they expect it to be nonsense and extremely difficult, trained to immediately just give up on doing anything alone.

>>37564 Trial and error, reading manuals, books and homepages that contained hints. Also: Exploring: "I wonder what this button does" for every single button, menu and option.

From personal experience it really isn't that hard, but also I get how overwhelming it is. I reccommend looking at newer tutorials for things like RPG Maker MZ. I know it won't be exactly what your using, but the same outline of how to make a game in it has stayed generally the same.

Something like Yume Nikki would be, all things considered, pretty easy to make, even if you don't know much about RPG maker. From a pure gameplay standpoint, it's basically a longer version of Adventure, an Atari game from 1980. To be clear, that's not a bad thing; a lot of what makes Yume Nikki Yume Nikki is its simplicity. But it is indeed a simple game, and if you poke around enough you should be able to make something like it in basically any engine.

When you need help. you ask Don Miguel https://web.archive.org/web/20021019172504/http://www.rpgmaker2000.narod.ru/rm2k_faq.htm

>>38080 also, of course, this site https://web.archive.org/web/20060818044614/http://www.rpg2knet.com/tutorials.php

>>37672 To be honest, this is good advice for any new software

>>37598 >It used to be that we didn't rely on tutorials, but figured things out for ourselves No we didn't, at least I didn't. Back in the XP days, software would come with thorough documentation built in, that's how I learned Flash. By no means did you have to spend a ton of time groping in the dark until you figured things out, it's just that companies memoryholed the fact that software used to come with documentation so that they could save money by avoiding writing it. When you clicked on the Help menu, you used to get actual help instead of just information about who made the software you were using.

>>38091 Some software back then had good docs, some had terrible or no docs. Same as now. Flash docs were okay for learning the functionality, but external resources like forums were still invaluable for learning how to effectively use that functionality to an artistic end. Or at least it was to me when I was a kid learning how to hack together enough actionscript to make cringey albinoblacksheep meme style games in the Macromedia days I don't remember much about rpg maker, but I used some other game engines by a small team of developers (often just one or two guys) and the experience of the documentation being basically "the help is out of date, we're totally gonna update it once everything is stable, but just play around with it and ask questions on our vbulletin forum" was very common back then. >When you clicked on the Help menu, you used to get actual help instead of just information about who made the software you were using. I too miss the help menu documentation from back in the day, but I suspect that's nostalgia goggles. A lot of the help menu documentation was clunky and as much as having to use a web browser (or even spin up a small local web server as I've seen for some projects that have interactive docs) gives me a bit of an ick, it is a lot easier to search through than those old help menus. But terminal based programs that don't have a man page or at least some plaintext docs and instead use html pages as docs still irks the soykaf out of me.

I went to a summer camp in like 2005 and they taught us how to use RPG maker over the course of 1-2 weeks

>>38080 >>38081 Got any more of these awesome resources but specifically about rm2003?