

EasyRPG - networked
https://easy-rpg.org/

======
skj
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.

~~~
jonnathanson
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.

~~~
copx
>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](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aveyond_series)

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

~~~
eropple
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).

~~~
copx
>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](http://www.amaranthgames.com)

~~~
eropple
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.

~~~
arm
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](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/](http://rpgex.sakura.ne.jp/home/)

The site for the game is here:
[http://rpgex.sakura.ne.jp/littleworld/index.html](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...](http://otakuoverdrive.com/2014/05/25/game-review-boushi-sekai-a-
little-world/)

~~~
eropple
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.

------
ivan_ah
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.

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

~~~
louhike
You can write scripts in Ruby since RPG Maker XP.

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

------
slowmover
Perhaps it's also worth mentioning mkxp in this thread:
[https://github.com/Ancurio/mkxp](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.

------
nnnnni
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.

~~~
derefr
OFF ([http://offgame.wikia.com/](http://offgame.wikia.com/)) and Yume Nikki
([http://yumenikki.wikia.com/](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.)

~~~
ANTSANTS
Seconding Yume Nikki. Wikipedia has a better summary:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yume_Nikki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yume_Nikki)

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

