Is RPG Maker a valid engine?

I recently got a copy of RPG Maker MZ and have been making some small games in there in my free time. I bought it with the intention to use it for a larger scale project I had been wanting to do for a while, but every time I bring it up to someone who has had experience making games, it's always either just no reaction or a kind of side-eye situation where they kinda poke fun at it. I know it isn't the most advanced tool, but it clearly has shown it can handle some crazier things with games like Yume Nikki, Omori, etc. What do y'all think about it?

If you want to make an RPG it's more than enough. Just go for it.

The only limits is the creativity you can conjure within the limitations of the engine. That's how games like Yume Nikki, Fear and Hunger and Omori came to be after all. Most people will give alot of importance on the engine of a game while it is in dev for some reason, but once it is released, none ever talks about it but the enthusiasts going "See?!?! Can you believe this game was made in [X]?? People should take this engine seriously!" My point is, don't worry much about the engine choice. It is a totally valid engine and plenty enough for your project in your judgement since you bought it. All that's left is toying with it and slowly work towards your final goal. Talk about your game more than the engine of choice :)

It's certainly a valid engine until you want to go significantly beyond what it may be able to offer, e.g. 2d isometric environment like Legend of Mana or Elemental Gimmick Gear, 3D isometric environment like Breath of Fire 3 or Grandia, not sure how well you can implement something like your character throwing a rock in projectile motion and collision detection for the rock in this engine, support for decoding WebP textures to significantly reduce space usage instead of doing everything in PNG and JPEG which would be useful if you do any high resolutions animations from many hand-drawn frames/CG, etc.

It depends on the needs of your project. Why don't you share a little about it? >every time I bring it up to someone who has had experience making games, it's always either just no reaction or a kind of side-eye situation where they kinda poke fun at it. Ask them why and then share their reasoning with us. We can only guess at why they're reacting this way. For what it's worth, my guess would be that it's because rpg maker is so well known and marketed to entry-level users that it's picked up by a lot of inexperienced developers and children who create a language of unfinished garbage and so people associate the tool with those users and their products. Or because the people you're talking to value something that isn't part of rpg maker, like free software, coding the engine yourself, or features that rpg maker doesn't offer (or they think doesn't offer). But again, you'll need to ask them. >making some small games in there in my free time. Share them with us, lain.

>>38106 >create a language of unfinished garbage meant "large amount" not "language"

>>38093 the only fundamental deciding question is this: can it do what you want it to do? >can it do 3d? >can it run ootb on modern windows? >can it fetch and use online resources? example questions ofc, but if it ticks a good amount of boxes then just do it. use a Pokemon ROM to hack and make a game out of. whatever it takes to bring your vision to fruition. take into consideration too, that limitation often breeds exceptional creativity. at the risk of psychologizing/projecting here, I'm gonna say that your concerns sound more or less like subconscious procrastination from peer pressure. possibly even an anti-competition strategy through FUD/apathy. (usually not conscious behavior) >every time I bring it up to someone who has had experience making games, it's always either just no reaction or a kind of side-eye situation where they kinda poke fun at it. reading this makes me want to smack the fuarrrk out of those cunts. I won't pretend to know why, and sorry if they're good friends if yours. just this snippet of context though. please continue going through with it, lainon. much love.

Two of my favorite games are made in it (Lisa the Painful and Corpse Party) so I guess it's not wrong to use it, just expect limitations

If you're looking to go into gamedev professionally, I would skip RPGmaker. If you're just doing this as a hobby, then there's absolutely nothing wrong with it.

It's fine. Only douchebags who are stuck in that edgy 13 year old snob who hates everything you like phase complain about it. I've played a fun game by Eight from Road Waffles made in RPG Maker. Also the Adventure Game Studio, if you want to make Lucasarts style games. Yahtzee made the 5 Days a Stranger series in this, and it made his career. Dink Smallwood is designed so you can make your own games with it. Abuse by Crackdot came with its own level designer that could be used like a language to write new games, but Satanpaint was notoriously difficult to learn. Sigh, whet we need now is another Flash. That was the single most powerful tool for indie game dev and animation.

>>38093 RPG Maker's good, but it's definitely got its limits. You can push it very, very far, making something that plays nothing like a standard RPG Maker game, but the end product is always going to have artifacts of the tool it was built with, to a much greater extent than a more general engine like GameMaker or Fusion. If you're making the kind of game RPG Maker lends itself to (top-down adventure games and vaguely Mother/Dragon Quest/Early Final Fantasy-style SNES-type JRPGs), and you don't have any particular reason not to use it, I say go for it. Otherwise, your time will be better spent using something more flexible.

>>38102 Actually the only limits are the constraints of JavaScript. It's a bitch and a half but you can get any JavaScript library working that you want in RPG Maker since MV. I implore you to check out the free RPG Paoer Maker though OP. People have hardly made any games using it yet. I really like the aesthetic

>>39604 (Not OP) is there a way to change the resolution/screen-size without mucking everything else up? Modern RPG maker is zoomed way the fuarrrk out and it looks really ugly.

>>39614 There definitely is because I've played games that have done it, but I'd have to figure out exactly how by scouring google, same as you

>>38093 I learned a lot about programming and how games work thanks to RPG Maker XP, when I was a kid. If you want to make RPGs, it's what it was made for I think people have no reaction because you're just starting, not because of the tool. A lot of people, and I mean a LOT, start making video games in their free time and abandon them. It's very difficult to finish one. But as you said, there are lots of good games made with RPG Maker People used to soykaf on Game Maker, but Undertale was made on it and it was a hit. It's just a matter of finishing it and having luck. And doing playtests and learning how to understand feedback (iteration is very important) Good luck lainon!

>>38093 Yes, because if you see have great games from RPG Make, like Yume Nikki, Fear and Hunger and most others.

Any tips on how to improve the performance of existing MZ games? Upgrading nwjs or passing flags to disable all animations (--force-prefers-reduced-motion --animation-duration-scale=0) to chrome does nothing for me.

It's absolutely valid, but unfortunately has a bad reputation. This is due to it being so easy to use, allowing for people to pump out tons of poorly-made slop games without any effort.

i only have XP and I was considering using it but I don't see anybody talk about programming with Ruby. I already know javascript but i dont rlly wanna pay 80 fuarrrkin dollars. thoughts lainons?

rpgmaker is an ok engine to make rpgs with. there are a lot of game engines you can buy on steam. smile game builder and rpg developer bakin also look like pretty cool tools for rpgs

I think most people who use RPG Maker just use it for making visual novels since for other stuff other game development engines offer more flex room. So depends what you want to do.

>>42280 Deepseek can do all the programming for you, you don't need to know Ruby. Since you know JS you should read this quick overview though so nothing surprises you too much: ''Learning Ruby from a JavaScript background'' https://github.com/gauthamchandra/learning-ruby-from-js?tab=readme-ov-file#topics

back in the day there was some glitch where every time you took gold out of a chest, it would actually remove that amount of gold from you. it was easily fixed with modifying some ruby somewhere. or so im told. i was too young to know about that then

what kind of question is this? It's a valid engine if it works for your use-case.

>>38093 Things like RPG Maker and Ren'Py make me feel bad about my career choice. With those engines it's not really necessary to know how to program, the real bottleneck is in art, writing and music which I never learnt to do properly.

>>42437 I can't speak for music or writing, but drawing is like programming, where the hardest part is the bare basics. Once you've figured out markmaking and construction, everything else clicks into place pretty fast.

>>42438 I hate you people acting like drawing is so easy. No it isn't when I can't draw a straight fuarrrking line.

>>42441 They just said drawing a straight line is hard

If people are making games with it, then it is a valid engine. May people ressent devs using RPG Maker all they want: all that matters is bringing enjoyable games to life. A player doesn't care if the tools used by a creator are hard to use or not.

>>42438 I'm 30. It's too late for me to learn.

>>42441 I didn't say it was easy, if anything, I said the exact opposite. Drawing a straight line is hard. Drawing a clear shape is hard. Drawing basic three-dimensional forms like cubes and cylinders is hard. These are things that take months on end of continuous, deliberate practice to get down, and until you've gotten them down, you're not going to be able to draw much of anything beyond crude stick figures. But once you do figure it out, everything else clicks into place and you can then learn to draw whatever you want fron there. This applies to basically any skill, by the way. Going back to the programming comparison I made last post, a beginner is going to spend a significant chunk of time building an understanding of things like variables, scope, control-flow and types, and then data structures and algorithms. But as soon as you know how to implement hashmaps and quicksort, you can then program most anything else. >>42447 My dad, who's nearly 60 and works a full-time job, picked up guitar a few months ago and is now fairly proficient at it. It's never too late to learn a new skill.

I've only used it for porn, specifically femdom stuff. There are a few masterpieces on RPGM

What I really like about RPG Maker MV and MZ games as a player is that they run in any OS with a working chromium browser, you only need to host the files onto an http server and then open www/index.html RPGM 2k and 2k3 games can be ran with easyrpg on a lot of platforms, I even installed it once on a fuarrrking Wii

Define "Valid Engine." If you're asking whether RPG maker is something that a quality game can be made with, the answer would be "yes," If you gave me a week to do research I might actually even be able to tell you some games that aren't Yume Nikki. If you're asking whether RPG maker is something a sophisticated game can be made with, then, my answer would be "no." So, if that's your aim then you'll need to look elsewhere. Generally I find it's pretty good for learning the ropes of game development, throwing concepts at the wall, fan games, joke games, "my first..." games, ect.