is RPG Maker VALID Gamedev Experience?

I speak about my time working on gacha games, how they were constructed, and how my experience using the database-driven RPG-Maker translated directly into valid industry design experience. I also talk about why RPG-Maker is good for people who want to focus on design. If you want to make an RPG, don't start from scratch! (short clip from this weeks "Let's Make Weird Stuff: RPGMaker" stream)

[@enddorb]

It makes perfect sense to me that RPG maker is good game design practice, since it lets you focus on the design with most or all of the code already present.

[@IndieGameClinic]

Unfortunately lots of folks listen to every piece of advice they get online, and a lot of device about game development comes from programmers who think that it's important for everyone to learn to do everything the "hard way". Which is probably true if your goal is to become a programmer. Not if you want to make a game.

[@RewdanSprites]

Great video. I used to use rpg maker back in the 90s as well. It's good. I don't remember being able to sell projects from it back then but you can now so I guess it's even better 😎. I'm considering going back to rpg maker if I do an rpg because of the fear of making inventory systems and levelling mechanics haha. The first time I had to code something like a save system in game maker using grids and converting them and so on was an absolute nightmare for me (glad I figured it out though but it did slow things down a lot). RPG maker MV literally just went on sale today so grabbed it cheap.

[@througtonsheirs_doctorwhol5914]

Thanks Doc, re-watching this video i just found the idea i needed !
This will be an encapsulated game for a little snippet of a future RPG =
"Mage Squire : wizardry's errand boy" , with the extension : mage scholar, mage librarian (to make the spells, and to manage the libraries themselves)
you are the erudite learner pupil of a wizard, and you fetch the spells in the library at camp with grimoires and spellbooks... too heavy carry on the battefield. So you teleport and querry it and return in a freeze-time loop as in pop culture
mETA with time freese and dimension warp (view could be a 8bit style book page flipping game with a timer to find the correct spell and send it to the wizard to cast it in time

[@dancingdoormanable]

RPGM as a simple tool to flesh out a design and story is great. Together with Ren'py it's often used for amateur story driven games as for those the gameplay is fairly standard. I hope that one day a converter will be available to move those simple games to an engine like Godot, so gamedev's can take it to the next level.

[@througtonsheirs_doctorwhol5914]

why not go back to the days when we created our engines to really code our games.... not using other's work?

[@dancingdoormanable]

@@througtonsheirs_doctorwhol5914 the answer can be different depending on the person and the project. In general you want to reach your goal of a working game faster by using high level tools or try out things in flux like story in a simple powerful tool before committing to the "hard" labor.
You might want to have the bragging rights on having it done all yourself and that's fine for a hobby, but for a commercial venture or professional career that's probably not efficient.
As for going back, I recently investigated the NEOGEO arcade and it struck me that it was intended to avoid making a whole new game machine for 2D games. It was a very successful console having 14 years of releases and famous for it's 2D fighting games. Yet when it came out it was the dawn of 3d and companies like Sega made very successful arcade games by making specific 3d supporting arcade hardware from the ground up. (Often combining using off the shelf chips with their own designs.) In the end it didn't matter because arcade halls are a thing of the past. (Although the freemium model with "pay to win" is suspiciously like the "Insert coin to continue" coin-ops.)
As a piece of art, cultural heritage and childhood nostalgia these machines can now all be emulated on "standard" PC or mobile hardware, making the implementation of those games specific to their time frame. It also implicates that the experience of the game is something out of your control no matter how low level you go, as emulating the game on your PC at home is a completely different experience then the arcade hall.
As for RPGM vs. a hand crafted engine, you will use other's work regardless and you will not control the game experience completely, but you can make a appealing game and you can improve that appeal by adjusting more details. Much of it can be done within RPGM, but at some point you have to jump to a lower level engine like Godot or even to a hand crafted engine.

[@IndieGameClinic]

I’m pretty sure I covered this in the video, but having the technical ability to be able to create a good game “from scratch” doesn’t guarantee you also have the creative ability to produce a game that anyone wants to play, let alone pay for. Players don’t care about your tools and techniques, they care about the game they get to play at the end of that process.

[@kaminekoch.7465]

@@througtonsheirs_doctorwhol5914 Because it's a waste of time? Also unless you write your game in assembler, you are using other's people work. You did not make OpenGL, Win32 or any other API that you would use. Game devs in PC88/DOS era also reused whatever they could and their ideal working environment would be something like we have today.

[@JohnSmith-uk6wh]

My answer without watching the video was yes. If you're making games, it's valid gamedev experience. Was glad to see the video also said it was valid.

[@chris_php]

I haven't used RPG maker I've been using Raylib and experimenting with stuff. It's true with stuff like the Inventory system we think that could be very easy to add but you need to have a system to store all the items, display the correct sprite, sort all the items in the inventory correctly, prevent duplication of items just to get a sort of basic inventory system.

[@IndieGameClinic]

Exactly - all of those things are time-consuming development/programming work, but they are not game design.

[@SoftTehCustomer]

How is RPGMaker NOT valid experience? It helped me out of tutorial hell, and it helped me better understand GDScript and Godot in general

[@IndieGameClinic]

@@SoftTehCustomer anyone who’s used it knows it’s helpful, but you’d be surprised by how many people think that learning C# is the main thing anyone needs to do to get a game dev job.

[@LiveDoG]

Golden quote: "Beginners try to copy things they like and make low-quality versions of them.

[@IndieGameClinic]

@@LiveDoG it’s a valid way of learning to do something. But it doesn’t usually produce something good. I think the indie boom really made a bunch of people think that their hobby learning projects are products-in-waiting… when they’d have a lot more fun, and probably make something better, if they threw that notion away.

[@LiveDoG]

@@IndieGameClinic Totaly agree

[@througtonsheirs_doctorwhol5914]

as true programming goes, ANY engine is not YOUR own home brew engine. So
RPG Maker == Unity == Godot == Any other engine you licence and don't make yourself.
Don,.t judge rpg maker if you use any non-self-made engine, you must learn to code by yourself Or use an engine, all engines are equal as they are not yours if you license them so stop judging RPG maker as i was judging it before (like i judge ALL engines equally)

[@througtonsheirs_doctorwhol5914]

TLDR = it's all betty crocker,people! CODE YOURSELF AN ENGINE, it's like learning to fish in the old addage. UNITY == RPG MAKER == GODOT, if you don't make 100% of the engine then it is ALL equally NOT your engine. period.