Poll: Does the RPG Maker engine bother you?

CrazyCrab

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Oct 26, 2013
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Hi everyone,
looking at the steam's release list I've noticed a couple of games from a fellow forum member that also uses RPG Maker and the one thing that every single RPG Maker game shares is an enormous thread talking about how a 5 year old could've made it in 5 minutes because it's not a real game.

I'm a 'programmer' myself and I've made some 'engines' for some of my games in the past, but none of them actually got finished. I worked on some RTS, survival adventure, platformers, shooters... anything really and the most bothersome thing when you start with nothing is getting the whole damn thing to work properly. This time when I decided to make an RPG I decided to not even bother with all of that and just use an existing engine.

I did not expect so much hate. Every RPG Maker game is filled with hate.

And the strangest thing is that the engine is actually good. You can completely reprogram everything, starting from the combat engine and ending with something like even turning the game into a sideways platformer. Not as if I'd make a platformer in it, but it's possible.
It's also nice to have all that art for free, even if it's just a placeholder it helps you do something when you don't know what to do and the tilesets can be just replaced afterwards.

Anyway, why do you think there is so much hate? Do you condemn people who use existing engines like this?

I'm pretty sure that the poll is anonymous so please be honest. If even here I'll face a ridiculous amount of negative feedback I might have to reconsider my whole project...
Thanks in advance!
 

WhiteFangofWhoa

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Jan 11, 2008
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Trolls gonna troll no matter what the game is. Don't let them get you down.

I support any gaming engine that allows people to express themselves creatively. I even enjoyed playing one RPG Maker game that was made with the extremely limited first incarnation of it on the Playstation, though I found the event triggers difficult to work with and understand personally. In other words, any complete RPG made using that engine likely required a phenomenal amount of effort to create, particularly if it was a solo effort.
 

shrekfan246

Not actually a Japanese pop star
May 26, 2011
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There's a difference between "does it bother you" and "do you hate it/condemn those who use it", I think.

RPG Maker games bother me, but generally speaking it's because I have yet to see a modern game made in the engine that doesn't have incredibly weird hitboxes for sprites and floaty movement controls in the maps. I won't proclaim to have absolute knowledge that all games in the engine will turn out the same way, but my experiences with it in the past are enough to make me not be particularly interested in games which do use it.

I expect something a little more like Final Fantasy VI, Chrono Trigger, A Link to the Past, etc. out of those top-down games, and it's rare that they have the same feeling of tight control in how you interact with the world.

None of that means there aren't good games made in it, of course. To The Moon was particularly... well, not "enjoyable" per se, but worth experiencing all the same.
 

Bad Jim

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Nov 1, 2010
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CrazyCrab said:
the one thing that every single RPG Maker game shares is an enormous thread talking about how a 5 year old could've made it in 5 minutes because it's not a real game.
This is probably more to do with the quality of the games themselves rather than the use of RPG Maker vs coding the engine yourself. RPG Maker does not enable you to make great games with ease. It enables you to make shit games with ease. A great game might be easier to make with RPG maker, but it will always require lots of hard work.

CrazyCrab said:
I've made some 'engines' for some of my games in the past, but none of them actually got finished. I worked on some RTS, survival adventure, platformers, shooters... anything really and the most bothersome thing when you start with nothing is getting the whole damn thing to work properly. This time when I decided to make an RPG I decided to not even bother with all of that and just use an existing engine.
If the effort of coding your own engine seemed like too much work, you may have put less effort into making your game than was required to make it great. Dare I suggest that you have produced a shit game?
 

Cerebrawl

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Feb 19, 2014
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While I have played and enjoyed some RPG maker offerings in the past, it has several limitations that sincerely annoy me.

For starters where's my damn options menu! Where's my resolution options? No I don't want to run the game in 640x400 on my 1080p monitor.

Heck, where's my rebindable keys? Where's my volume control?
 

Smooth Operator

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Oct 5, 2010
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It does bother me very much yes, because the engine is set up for that one very specific FF sprite RPG and if you try to go beyond that mold it takes absurd amounts of workarounds which means people will simply not do it, so we end up with the exact same game slightly modified with dialogue almost every time.

That is not what I would call a good creation tool.
 

CrazyCrab

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Oct 26, 2013
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Bad Jim said:
CrazyCrab said:
the one thing that every single RPG Maker game shares is an enormous thread talking about how a 5 year old could've made it in 5 minutes because it's not a real game.
This is probably more to do with the quality of the games themselves rather than the use of RPG Maker vs coding the engine yourself. RPG Maker does not enable you to make great games with ease. It enables you to make shit games with ease. A great game might be easier to make with RPG maker, but it will always require lots of hard work.

CrazyCrab said:
I've made some 'engines' for some of my games in the past, but none of them actually got finished. I worked on some RTS, survival adventure, platformers, shooters... anything really and the most bothersome thing when you start with nothing is getting the whole damn thing to work properly. This time when I decided to make an RPG I decided to not even bother with all of that and just use an existing engine.
If the effort of coding your own engine seemed like too much work, you may have put less effort into making your game than was required to make it great. Dare I suggest that you have produced a shit game?
Well, the thing is that I wrote that I'm a 'programmer' on purpose as I'm not actually anything close to a professional so it takes me forever to get anything working. I always thought of myself as more of a game designer rather than the programmer and that's the part that I enjoy the most... thats also one of the reasons why using this engine is so useful, I can finally do stuff I enjoy. There's a reason why I study English/French/German instead of programming right now - let's just say my exams didn't go that well >.>

That's not to say I cannot do anything, but a one man team cannot do that much.
 

RandV80

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Oct 1, 2009
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It doesn't bother me at all, though despite being a huge life-long JRPG fan I'm not really into it at all. Nothing wrong if people want to try their hand at making a game, and the more that try the better. If you have some programming skill but lacking artistic, it provides you with all the art assets you need. Or if you're artistically inclined but don't know programming, you got the engine that does it all for you.

My only real criticism of the engine itself is that it's very, very dated. If you look through the history of the genre, JRPG's were continuously evolving from the 16 bit days into the DVD era. Just look at Square for example. FFIV had your very basic traditional JRPG mechanics, could have been released on the NES. With FFVI, they innovated an active time battle system. 1 year later with Chrono Triggers, they improved that with a more tactical design. Looking around at other JRPG's of the time, the Lunar games on the Sega CD in random battles incorporated movement points. They weren't released in the West at the time but Star Ocean and Tales of Phantasia started their real time action combat for the random battles.

So getting to the point, where does the RPG maker fall into this? While a good artist can make it look like a later SNES era game, the game mechanics are firmly stuck at the FFIV level. Because of that while it's a good place to get your feet wet if you're going to actually sell a game for $$$ I really wish people would make their own engines.
 

DrOswald

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Apr 22, 2011
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Bad Jim said:
If the effort of coding your own engine seemed like too much work, you may have put less effort into making your game than was required to make it great. Dare I suggest that you have produced a shit game?
You do know that most games are coded using a preexisting engine, right? Speaking as a professional programmer, finding a tool that already does what you want to do is far more efficient than making it yourself. This is why JQuery exists.

I really don't understand why so much of the indie game community condescends when someone chooses to use a tool like RPG Maker to make a game. If it is capable of doing what you need it to do then using a preexisting tool is a good thing. That is what real programmers do.
 

Magix

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Oct 19, 2013
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I'm wondering as to how many people actually know what an engine is or does. People discuss it, but I imagine someone that has no experience in code (especially object oriented code) would have difficulty actually grasping the concepts of what it provides for you. If that's true, these people aren't really qualified to talk about it..
 

DrOswald

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Apr 22, 2011
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CrazyCrab said:
Hi everyone,
looking at the steam's release list I've noticed a couple of games from a fellow forum member that also uses RPG Maker and the one thing that every single RPG Maker game shares is an enormous thread talking about how a 5 year old could've made it in 5 minutes because it's not a real game.

I'm a 'programmer' myself and I've made some 'engines' for some of my games in the past, but none of them actually got finished. I worked on some RTS, survival adventure, platformers, shooters... anything really and the most bothersome thing when you start with nothing is getting the whole damn thing to work properly. This time when I decided to make an RPG I decided to not even bother with all of that and just use an existing engine.

I did not expect so much hate. Every RPG Maker game is filled with hate.

And the strangest thing is that the engine is actually good. You can completely reprogram everything, starting from the combat engine and ending with something like even turning the game into a sideways platformer. Not as if I'd make a platformer in it, but it's possible.
It's also nice to have all that art for free, even if it's just a placeholder it helps you do something when you don't know what to do and the tilesets can be just replaced afterwards.

Anyway, why do you think there is so much hate? Do you condemn people who use existing engines like this?

I'm pretty sure that the poll is anonymous so please be honest. If even here I'll face a ridiculous amount of negative feedback I might have to reconsider my whole project...
Thanks in advance!
As a professional programmer, I can say that if the RPG Maker tool helps you make games then it is good. The only real problem with RPG Maker is a pretty inflexible tool. It can do many things but it really isn't a good fit for most games.

As for why there is so much hate, many amateur programmers are drama queens (the same can be said of virtually any amateur community.) RPG Maker is a tool that simplifies game making to a point that you need very little programming skill to make a game, so long as it fits into the mold. This makes people upset because you didn't have to piece together a working knowledge of C++ from web tutorials. In addition, the simplicity of making a game on RPG maker means that there are tons of low quality games out there made on the platform.

If you ever want to branch out a bit and make more complex or just different games I would recommend Game Maker Studio. It is a very robust game making tool, great for a hobbyist. I feel it strikes the right balance between simplicity and versatility that is perfect for hobbyist programming. Though I am capable of using much more versatile tools than Game Maker it is my choice tool when programming for fun.

I am currently putting together a library of utilities, scripts, and objects for Game Maker that can be used to greatly simplify the process of creating games. for example, I have a bunch of stuff that will allow you to implement complex menus with little programming knowledge. I am currently putting together a low scripting requirement platformer engine, and I was thinking of putting together a touch screen based RPG engine next because I have yet to find an RPG with controls that truly takes advantage of the touch screen.
 

Frozengale

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Sep 9, 2009
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I don't have much experience with the Engine. I think I tried using one of the earlier builds of the Engine when I was a kid and from what I remember the combat options seemed to be very limited. If that is still true then I still have a beef with the engine. If you can tell a good story with bland combat then go for it. If you don't know how to program yourself then yeah it's better than nothing. I honestly think you'd be better off picking up Unity and buying some of the RPG Assets on the store, but if you don't feel up to that, and RPG Maker helps you make something then use it. It's better to make a crappy game with an incredibly restrictive engine then to make nothing at all.
 

MeChaNiZ3D

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Aug 30, 2011
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It doesn't make people any better at making games, because you need a good idea and good implementation. Making te implementation easier doesn't make the idea any more engaging, and people who make an RPG with a poor plot, uninteresting characters and shallow gameplay are still going to garner exactly the audience they would have otherwise. When you buy a game you don't buy the effort, you buy the product. Furthermore, less time investment means people like me (I'm dabbling in GameMaker), who have other shit to do like study and organise an internship and are doing a degree that has nothing to do with games, can still make some progress without it being a fucking arduous slog. It's like if you hired someone to trim a hedge for you, would you distinguish between the one who does it with a hedgetrimmer in 15 minutes or the one who does it with secateurs in half an hour if they took the same pay and did the same standard of job? No.

The one thing I do have somewhat of a problem with is that the naturally limited ability of game-production-assisting software is that it has restrictions, some more than others, that could prevent a really original game. But most of the time you can do new things with the tools you have anyway.
 

SinisterGehe

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May 19, 2009
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My issue with RPG makers is that it doesn't take much to make anything there. Also reusing of assets and content constantly.
Don't get me wrong here there are some good RPG maker games and creators. But the thing with them is, they usually script the content in there really well and do clever tricks with it. And they are usually also stellar story tellers.

My biggest issue is that they can push out a game with quite minimal effort, publish/sell. Leading to lower the quality of what is on offer. (Granted that has been happening anyways, but they are developers with their names on the line)
And most of the time these people have not done anything special with the engine.

I would recommend to anyone who is even serious about creating games to try unity or similar engine.

Then also that there is the fact that finding good content that uses the engine since it got steam and the bar to entry got even lower. Got much harder. And after a while killed my interest to the sub-genre totally.
 

softclocks

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Mar 7, 2014
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It doesn't bother me at all.

It's given us great games like "Violated Heroine" and that's all I ask.
 

scotth266

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Jan 10, 2009
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If anyone says that they can make an RPG Maker game in five minutes, all you need to do is laugh hysterically. Like any other game development, it takes a large amount of time to even make barely-decent-looking maps, let alone a somewhat-balanced combat system, a half-assed plot, etc. Making such things GOOD takes even longer, obviously.

I screwed around with the tool once and with about 24 hours of time, I succeeded in making one shitty town and a two chunks of forest (which I liked better than the town, oddly enough). I had only the most threadbare plot and the combat was absolutely terrible.

Still sorta proud of it though, and seeing the other RPG Maker games on Steam gets me thinking about actually going back to finish my project. It'll probably never happen, but I'm content to dream for now.
 

Jandau

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Dec 19, 2008
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It doesn't bother me. Steam is flooded with poop anyway. Why would one particular source of poop bother me more than others...
 

Tayh

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Apr 6, 2009
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It mostly bothers me due to the shitty graphics, poor gameplay mechanics and the inability to turn off the incessant music/sounds without muting everything else as well.
Of course, it's been a while since I've played a such game, so maybe it's different now.
 

synobal

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Jun 8, 2011
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It doesn't bother me but you might want to look into game maker instead of rpg maker. It's better in my opinion.