i could never go back to RPG Maker

My first experience with RPG Maker was as a wee babby when I fiddled around with RPGM XP. I got stuck trying to implement something in my project and went to the internet to search for an answer. The top result had a solution to the the effect of “Just use RPG Maker VX, it’s way better.”¹

So I did.

And then I diddled with VX/Ace for the next few years. I never properly made anything because I became stuck in the biggest (probably), most common pitfall to newbies interested in game development. I got hung up on all the ideas and feature’s i’d like my potential game to have. I never actually did anything substantial.

I spent my days scouring countless RPG Maker forums and other websites to pilfer as many freebie assets as I could. This free BGM sounds so intense! It’s perfect for an emotional scene! This set of character face graphics are so neat! I could envision a sappy story between these two characters! These RTP edits are well done! I’ve got to save these in my back pocket for a future game!

I never made a game. I spent too much time window-shopping. I constantly thought about the features and plot twists I enjoyed from my favourite games. I played other people’s projects to get an idea of what was possible in the engine. I wanted to do something profound and memorable. I wanted my creation to leave an impression, just like all these other games have.

One of my favourite RPG Maker games is this game someone created using the RPG Maker 3 engine for PlayStation 2. It’s a very silly game about a boy (Jeeb Jorb) who is forced to venture out on a journey to get milk from Starbucks because he is poor and his mommy needs the poor people milk to make Lucky Charms for his breakfast.

Man Guy: I like cheating on women, how about you?
Jeeb Jorb: I’m like 6, so…
Man Guy: I mean, come on, I’ve got two wives and I’m cheating on both of them. You know what I’m saying?
Jeeb Jorb: I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to hear this.
Man Guy: I used to live in Other Town, but after I slept with every woman there, it started getting a little awkward.

It’s a pretty amusing game and I still think about it sometimes to this day.

I found inspiration in so many projects. I created and refined so many of my original characters and ideas throughout the years, but none of them saw the light of day. Why is this?

Because I had no structure.

I think every newbie game dev should start off by participating in a game jam at least once.

Despite discovering and tinkering in RPG Maker since 2008 or so, I didn’t publish my first proper game until 2022. Well, what happened in 2022? I decided to join a game jam. The “My first game jam: summer of 2022”, to be specific.

A ‘jam’ is simply a “contest” to create something within a specified timeframe. I’m sure there must be jams for other fields of expertise (such as music-making or coding), but my knowledge lies with games, of course. A Jam can be centered around a certain theme. “Spooky Halloween jam!”, “Eternity jam”, “Retro jam”. A jam can have certain requirements or stipulations, such as developing a game in a specific engine only (Godot, Unity, RPG in a Box, etc.). The timeframes can be as short as a couple of hours, to as long as a couple of months. A lot of the smaller details will usually vary. You just have to find the right jam for your needs.

The purpose of the “My first game jam: summer of 2022” is self-explanatory The theme of the jam that year was “Heal”, though i can’t remember whether the theme was a strict requirement or merely a suggestion. I believe the timeframe was about a month. I prefer jams that have a timeframe of at least a month because I’m still a novice and have other hobbies & obligations that I’d like to tend to. This kind of timeframe allows me the wiggle room to take it easy and breathe, but not take too long to the point where i become too relaxed and lazy. It’s a nice balance.

^{For my first RPG Maker game, I decided to tell the story of a protagonist that could “heal” from any physical wound because they suddenly became immortal.}

Entering this jam forced me to see the error of my lollygagging ways. I was forced to prioritize that which was essential. There were many fun features and goodies I wanted to include in the game, but were they necessary? What was most vital to producing the game? Was it really worth it to spend my time going all out on the artwork and/or adding every little joke i could think of as flavour text to the various objects the player may inspect? Or was it better to spend that time implementing the major story beats so that the player could, y’know, have a game to play?

Adding the little touches can wait. Polish and perfection comes later. A game jam forces its participants to recognize this, because time is a valuable resource. That’s true for other real life stuff too. whatever.

Just make the game. Focus only on the essentials.

If your game is about a hero that must fight a dragon to rescue a lovely lady, then just do that. What are the major story beats?

Hero is notified by the king that the princess has been kidnapped
Hero travels through the nearby forest and kills some monsters on the way
Hero reaches the castle and defeats the dragon
Hero escorts the lady back to the kingdom
It turns out the king was not her true father. He kidnapped her as a child and the dragon was simply trying to shelter her 😦

It will be short and to-the-point, but that’s all you need. Because congratulations! You finally created something!

Only then once all of the major beats have been implemented is when you can worry about adding:

Customization options for the hero
A day/night cycle and weather system
A nurture/companion system for the hero’s pet dire wolf
A commission board for the hero to take on quests to build up the money to purchase the ultimate bismuth sword
A complex side mission that results in the hero learning the true nature of the king to unlock a secret ending

I already detailed the biggest thing that threw me off of RPG Maker, but tl;dr, i was fed up with the restraints. For most people, this may not be an issue, but in one of my games, the player character controls a cow. The cow graphic, of course, would be shorter and wider than your typical human. I experienced too many hang-ups and frustrations when trying to implement this cow character in my custom-made parallax maps. It was too hard for me to figure out how to properly the layer the foreground/background elements when the player has a wide graphic. I got so fed up that i took a break. i stopped working on it.

For a long time, i had my hopes staked on RPG Maker Unite. I obviously couldn’t accomplish what I wanted to do in MZ, so maybe Unite could be my saviour? The braindead ease of RPG Maker with the power of Unity?? Hello?? Sounds like a dream! Unfortunately, they released an impression trailer and it killed all the desire i had in my body.

^{The worst RPG Maker so far?}

This trailer is only 45 seconds, and not a lot of gameplay examples or menu/UI are shown. Even so, they did their best to showcase the worst the engine has to offer.

The default graphics/assets are so UGLY. They look WORSE than prior iterations in the series. The character walking animations look so janky. The graphics of the characters don’t even seem to match up so well with the environment. It looks like someone grabbed pre-made assets from different creators/sources and mashed them together without any thought to cohesion. The comments are all in agreement that it doesn’t look so hot.

One of my favourite creators in the indie game dev space made a video that cemented my views on the engine. There’s a lot wrong with Unite, but one of the biggest issues he had with it was the roadmap. It detailed many fixes and features they planned to implement over the following months/years(?). It included goals such as:

Fixing a bug in which pressing “ESC” caused everything in an event to disappear
Removing a button from the toolbar that only served to exit the software without any confirmation
implementation of “undo/redo” functions
Implementation of “spacebar” and “Z” to function as “OK” or confirmation buttons
adding the ability to copy and paste event pages
adding an “idle” motion for side view graphics
and so much more

How is any of that acceptable for a software at launch??

INTRODUCING: RPG DEVELOPER BAKIN

^{I want to make games without having to learn how to code!}

i think it was a sign from the heavens that i discovered RPG Developer Bakin not long after being letdown by RPG Maker Unite.

RPG Developer Bakin is another one of those no-coding engines. It specializes in that 2.5D aesthetic (games that look like octopath traveler or that Live-A-Live remaster). It allows for a mix of 2D and 3D, though you can go all out with an all-2D or only 3D project if you’d like.

Bakin is a little more complex than RPG Maker, but still a lot easier than something like Unity (for us no-coding babies, at least). there are so many features bakin has that are either impossible or incredibly hard to do in RPGM without the use of plugins or coding.

From the perspective of someone who ditched RPG Maker, here are some of the things i love about bakin:

NO NEED TO LIMIT YOURSELF TO RIGID TILESETS
innate footstep sounds
built-in sprite/animation tool
3D sound (sound is louder/quieter depending how close you are to the event)
layout system (edit or create ANY kind of menu you want. it will simply work)

When I first made the switch to bakin, I immediately went to work on making that cow game i mentioned earlier. I couldn’t get it to work RPG Maker, but bakin could be my salvation! Though I quicky came to realize that I had to stop way too often to search through the Wiki or ask questions in the discord community on how to accomplish certain things. It was all too new to me. I had to slow down and take the time to really understand the engine.

This is why I made my Nutcracker game. I created it mostly as a break to familiarize myself with the engine. My biggest hurdle when making the switch to Bakin was the use of cameras. I had no idea wtf to do with a tangible camera in 3D space. This is why i played around with different camera styles with varying degrees of control in the game. A 360° camera with total control is… annoying to manage. I don’t want to worry myself with creating a perfect environment that looks great from all angles. i now understand that i enjoy camera’s that have a semi-restricted viewing range. I like the idea of the player having the wiggle room to pivot the camera side-to-side to get a better appreciation of the environment. I utilized this in the cow game for a certain sidequest. In it, you’re meant to locate X amount of clues on the stage, but you can’t properly see one of them unless you pivot the camera to the sides. it’s all about perspective!

It’s only fairly recently that i came to understand that a completely 2D game can be made in bakin as well. In fact, i’m currently participating in a jam in which i decided kind of last-minute to go with this approach.

With adjustments to the rendering settings, and selecting orthographic view (no perspective, essentially) you can pretty much recreate the look of an RPG Maker game in bakin.

_{For the above example, I quickly sketched and reused some 2D assets to put together to practice doing a completely 2D game in bakin. if the character movement looks a little strange, that’s because it is and it is my fault. I accidentally mixed up the order for which the character should face. So the character faces to the right when she’s supposed to face upwards, hehe}

So far, I like achieving this 2D look in bakin. It’s nice to not be bound by a strict grid-based walking system, and the innate physics/lighting capabilities are nice to make use of as well! But it’s definitely a lot more of a hassle and a bit more time-consuming to achieve this look in bakin as opposed to RPGM.

To achieve this in bakin, all elements of the map (background, foreground) must be separated–similar to the process of parallax mapping in RPGM. What’s most time-consuming for me is managing the camera when doing this. Right now, it takes a lot of educated guessing and trial-and-error to fiddle with the camera settings to get it just right. I have to manually adjust the camera and its tracking ranges to ensure nothing can be viewed from outside the bounds of the map. In RPGM, you don’t have to do anything special. If you walk to the edge of the map in RPGM, the camera stops. It will not go “out of bounds” beyond the map limits.

Just now, i spent the past half hour-ish trying to troubleshoot a strange issue with the camera. I’m making a cutscene in which the camera is meant to pan from one side of the map to the other. It just wasn’t working. The camera kept reversing or rotating the image on screen for some reason?? Very strange. I finally decided to try a new camera from scratch and recreated the panning motion all over again. That ended up resolving the issue. idk. 🙃

I’ve never had any issues with camera like this when making a “typical” game in bakin, only when trying to achieve this top-down 2D look. Oh well. Clearly there are other engines more suited for working with 2D only. But I still prefer bakin. I’d still rather deal with these occasional headaches in bakin over having to limit myself to a certain amount of assets per map (tilesets) in RPGM. It can be tiresome, but it’s worth it for me. I have faith that these drawbacks will only improve over time, seeing as the engine is still in early access.

_{It can be kind of a headache, but something like this just couldn’t really be replicated in RPG Maker}

I made more games in RPG Developer Bakin within the span of a year than I ever did with RPG Maker in the span of 12+ years

Despite how this post may come off, my intention is not to shit on RPG Maker (except Unite. Unite is utter shit). So many creators are producing wonderful things with RPG Maker every day. Some of my favourite games were made in RPG Maker (LISA, Ib, Omori, To The Moon series) and they have been a great source of inspiration for me. To try and claim that RPGM is bad would be insinuating that all of these talented creators and their amazing games were simply exceptions to the rule. That would be disingenuous and not reflective of reality.

No, I truly attribute my distaste of RPGM to one thing alone–personal preference. That’s it. I had so much time to do something with the engine, but i never did. That’s on me. But this fancy new engine drops into my life and suddenly it all clicks.

I work best with bakin. I have more fun and i enjoy working in it more than RPGM. Simple as that.

(btw, can I just say that i absolutely love the RPG Maker community for constantly telling people to “look in the manual/it’s in the documentation” when responding to a question? Because I would come across that so often as a child that it really left an impact on me. Thanks to this advice, I will often try to seek a solution to my troubles in the official help documents or manual first, rather than immediately going to google or crying in discord. This goes for any software or program I use. Pretty dope.) ↩︎

Lovely little creature