So, due to being at a bit of a block with Veyrra’s development (I’m seriously ready to just rip out the battle system and work on it separately at this point, though even doing that I’m not sure I’d fix all the problems with it) I’ve hit a bit of a more major snag.
I’m not sure if RPG Maker is really the right engine for me to be devloping in anymore.
Don’t get me wrong; I love using RPG Maker, it’s a great engine, I’m just hitting a point where my abilities and what I want to do aren’t exactly possible without seriously rewriting the code (because a lot of what I want to do involves visual novel aesthetics and features, and though there are a few script out there that cover some of those things since it’s a common form for cutscenes these days, there isn’t one for everything and I’m really not skilled enough as a coder yet to change or add what I want to have on my own… nor do I have the money to pay somebody else)
The other problem is the community surrounding the engine. RPG Maker itself is billed like it’s a hobbyist tool (the whole “simple enough for a child”) but there’s a lot of elitism that honestly makes the whole community (both the people making games in the engine and the people playing games) extremely toxic. I didn’t say anything before, but I had to step back a few times and avoid forums and other places because as much as the community tries to put out a friendly and inviting air underneath that the drama thrown around gets to be too much. That’s all I’m really going to say. It’s all I should really have to say. I’m not going to stop following creators or paying attention to new things that come out; I’ve sunk way too much money to just stop following what’s happening in the community entirely, but it’s a good time for me to just move on right now.
This actually doesn’t change as much as people might think; Veyrra will still be made in RPG Maker MV, mostly because I’ve already done too much work to switch to anything else at this point (I don’t know any of the other game engines I could switch it to well enough, and besides the battle system and some menus I pretty much have it all working. It’d be a pain and WAY too much of a hassle to port it to something else at this point)
As for everything else, I’ll probably mess around with Ren’Py, since I have used it a bit before and understand a little about how it works (plus it’s designed a bit more for making VNs, so that’s a bit of a plus) The other reason why I should probably switch is I’m not always at my computer anymore, and so working on events gets to be a lot harder, especially since I could write the entire script out, but it still has to get paste into the game engine, and there’s always a high chance in between the text editor and the engine it gets in there wrong. With Ren’Py, I can pretty much work on at least a portion of the game in a text editor no matter where I am (provided I keep the terms and formatting right. My spelling isn’t always the best, which might be why I struggle with coding)
I think the first thing I’m going to do is just make a silly, personal little game (something I’m never going to release publicly) just to see if I can use it, then I have about one or two ideas I can modify (I’m already using assets that can only be used in RPG Maker, so I’ll have to switch those out, but otherwise it shouldn’t be that hard to move either of them over)
lemongreen Games 