I have a complete concept for a game that I will use RPG Maker to create. I don’t want to say too much until more work has been done on it. I’ve set a timeline of about 2 months to finish the rough draft. That means focusing on a narrow scope of features and story so that something is complete before September. Now, when I say complete, I don’t necessarily mean finished. I’m considering it to be a rough draft and it might only have stock assets by that time.
How narrow a scope are we talking here? For now, I am not including battles or any action elements. I really want to focus on the script and design of the world first and foremost. It’s going to be an adaptation of a story that already exists. This is what I want to keep secret. When the secret is revealed, I don’t think many people will scream in excitement, but there might be one person and I want it to be special for them. I don’t know if I’ll be able to tell the entire story before September, but the plan is to have a complete chapter at the very least.
While developing it, I plan on posting in this thread every day so that I can keep myself accountable. This is key. I meant to make this post on Saturday so it’s really important that I get started now!
Here’s what I plan to do before my next update:
Choose a version of RPG Maker for the project
Outline a draft of the first room
Good luck! I have tentative plans to do something similar in the next couple years, but I have outstanding interactive fiction obligations I need to put to bed first, and that will keep me occupied for at least the next ten months. Very interested to see how this works for you!
Thank you for the luck! I’m trying to leverage my sweet teacher’s vacation to enjoy creating things. I’ve never made a game before and I’ve never taken on a multi-month creative project, but I’ve been excited about this idea for over a month now. We’ll see where it goes!
We’ve decided to go with RPG Maker 2003. Having limited features could be a benefit for keeping the design restrained. Also, there are so many projects that were made with it that we admire, so it really is capable of doing something. On top of it all, I remember back in the early 2000s, I made a little town with all the usual stuff: children chasing each other in a circle and chickens you can talk to. I think it would be satisfying to finish a project with the same tool I had first experienced almost two decades ago.
I’m coming up with a set of rules of style, my own best practices for the writing. For one, I don’t like when the pacing of a game has too much reading all at once, so I’m making a rule: dialogue will fit into 30 characters per row, 3 rows at a time, with a maximum of 3 sets per discussion. Fingers crossed that 3 really is the magic number.
Work I plan to do before my next update: Make a sketch of a room with one “goal”
So, I sort of met my goal, but really I used today as a way to break ground with the program. There were lots of quirks of RPGMaker2k3 that I’ll need to get familiar with and I encountered a few of them today. I tried to set up an event where the player would talk to a character, the character would challenge them to a game, and if the player accepted they’d be directed to stand at a certain point. Once at that point, I wanted that to trigger the other character to run to meet them. I sort of got this to work but in a very broken way where the character ran at the player and didn’t stop running. I mean, they would just zoom around like a fly. Clearly, I need more practice with setting events up just so.
Another quirk I played with was the tileset. RPGMaker2k3 has a very low resolution by design, and that means the tilesets are really small, too. My ideal aesthetic would be something like collage, not the clean cartoonish pixel art that RPGmaker steers you toward. To test this aesthetic with the tileset, I found a picture of a trashcan, shrunk it down to just a couple of pixels and set it into a tileset. It made a really crunchy image, which I like, but I’m going to have to work hard to find a balance between a deliberately messy design and something that’s actually legible.
Work I plan to do before my next update: outline a set of rooms, making sure doors and events work across sections.
I was able to get a room transition to work, but I haven’t done as much with outlining a series of rooms yet. That’s because I got sucked into inserting custom assets. I wanted to give myself a preview of Stage 2: Aestheticize. In that stage, I’m going to work on inserting songs, placing photographs into the work, and mess with sprite animations. I really want to be careful here because I know that this can exponentially expand the scope of time it will take to complete this when the real soul of it will be in the writing and sequence. On the other hand, it is very cool to take pictures of Gunpla and stuffed animals and see them walk around to the Beach Boys.
What I really need to do now before I start getting into the weeds is find a great tutorial or resource for making this project work. So far, I’ve been intuiting my way around RPGM2k3 when I could probably find more graceful solutions elsewhere. It’s scary to flesh out the project because these ideas are perfect in my head but they’re only the ghost of the real thing. It takes a lot of work to materialize.
this is exactly what the program is for, thank you for your service
im less familiar with 2003 than other versions but eventing hasn’t changed that much over time, i can try to answer eventing questions if you get hung up on anything
I haven’t updated in a couple of days but that’s not because I haven’t been thinking or working on the project. I asked a couple of my friends if they would like to help make music for it and they’re really excited about it. I outlined how big the full story might be in an adapted form then decided we should focus on just the first act. I am trying to keep things mathematically concise so I can organize it in my head. I’m planning on the first act being four “rooms,” each with three character goals. This helps me schedule the project because I can think of finishing one room for every ten days and using the remaining time to polish things up.