One of the greatest challenges facing indie game developers is finding effective ways to promote our games. With this article, I intend to offer some tips and advice that may help you in your goals. With that said, let’s get started. Continue reading
So, you’ve found yourself facing the exciting world of game development. You’ve done your research, crunched the figures and now you’re ready to jump into those little details that will really make your game stand out. In other words, you’re ready for art. But where to start?
Most developers will start with what’s easily available: the RTP.
The RTP has a lot going for it. It’s essentially free with the purchase of RPG Maker, it’s done in a single and cohesive style, and it’s got a huge variety of edits from many community members. If you’re creating a classic medieval-style game, it’s got most everything you’ll need. As a style, it’s bright, cheerful and reminiscent of adventure.
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So, last time we cheated the autotile system to give us tile and a half high walls. Are you ready for the second challenge?
For this challenge I’m going to give you an enemy, two skills, and a modified state to use.
The enemy!
The skills!
This skill targets 3 random enemies and induces deep sleep 75% of the time on each enemy.
This skill drains hp from all enemies equal to the casters magic attack * 4 – the targets magic defense * 2, but ONLY works if the target is affected by the state Deep Sleep (make sure the number in bstate?(*) is the same as Deep Sleep’s state number in the database). Otherwise it does 0 damage. This uses a custom damage formula based on Fomar’s excellent custom damage formula tutorial to accomplish this.
And this is the State:
Deep Sleep is identical to sleep with the exception that it is only removed by damage 50% of the time.
Ok, now that we have all the materials… what is the challenge?!
Description: You have these skills, but you will notice I didn’t show you the Action Patterns of the Shades. Your job is this: Create a troop containing 2 shades. Now make it so that when all the player characters are awake, the shades will ONLY use Sleep Breath, BUT if at least one of the player characters is under the influence of Deep Sleep, the shades will use Sleep Breath and Dream Feed equally.
Restrictions: No scripting.
You can use the comments here, or comment on the link from our Facebook page to offer up solutions. GOOD LUCK!
Congratulations to everyone who discovered a way to mimic what I did!
There were quite a few creative solutions, and one person even hit on the exact solution I used (curse you Liberty!).
So lets look at how I did it:
All I did, was take the wall autotile, and continue it up into the ceiling autotile. Here is a screenshot showing how it was done:
Notice how the wall autotile for the grey brick extends up higher into the wall top autotile above it. This let my place the wall top on top which would be half wall top, half wall. You can even see that I forgot to darken the edges, which created what looked like a shift click error in my image last week.
Now, when thinking outside the box, there is one other thing you have to keep in mind: What are the repercussions of handling it this way. There are two big ones for my method:
Now that we have identified the repercussions, we have to decide whether its something we can work with. In this case I decide both are acceptable compromises.
With 1. I just have to do some editing if I want to use an autotile that doesn’t tile perfectly every 16 pixels. Its more annoying, but not impossible. It just requires more work.
With 2. I don’t see this as that big of an issue. You have way more room in the wall section of the tilesets than you can use in any one map, and if I REALLY went over the needed space there for the whole game, I can make another tileset.
Stay tuned for the next challenge! Did you learn anything from this one? Share with us in the comments below.
So what do you think the most important skill is to making a game with RPG Maker?
If you read the title of the blog post (how did you get here if you didn’t) you can guess what I think it is: The ability to think outside the box. There are lots of ways to think outside the box: You can think of a way to tell a story that isn’t the norm or a gameplay mechanic in a way that it wasn’t originally intended, but in these challenges, what I want you to focus on is accomplishing things in the maker by using the structure of the program in unconventional ways.
Every so often, I’m going to put up a Challenge. The challenge will be issued in the form of a series of screenshots or a video with a description plus a list of restrictions to keep you from taking the easy way.
You can play by leaving a comment on the blog post with an explanation of how to theoretically accomplish the exact same After a week is up, I’ll make another blog post, congratulating anyone who figured out a way to copy the screenshot, while doing a detailed explanation of how I accomplished the task. There really isn’t a prize for accomplishing it, other than stretching your brain and learning more about the program. And you know, the ability to rub it in other people’s face, which is always fun.
So, now that I’ve explained the game, let’s begin:
Description: Look at the wall heights and thickness. Tile and a half high walls! half tile thickness! What sorcery is this?!
Restrictions: No parallax mapping. Everything is done with tiles alone.
One of the great things about the RPG Maker line is how customizable it is. Almost any feature you can think of can be implemented with events or scripts. And even if you don’t know how to script, you can find plenty of ready to use scripts written by some amazing coders over on our forums.
This can lead to brilliant things… and horrible things. One of the problems that newbies (and some veterans) have is trying to decide: What scripts/features should I include in my game? A lot of times this ends up with what is known as Script Bloat. They include everything they can think of, without thinking of how it works in the game. I’m going to propose 4 easy questions you can ask yourself to determine whether you really need that feature you are considering throwing in. I’ll also include a couple of examples from big name RPGs to illustrate my point. Continue reading
Hi there! So you’re ready to tackle making the game you’ve always wanted to play. You’ve gathered resources and scripts and you’ve made a demo.
You share it with some friends and they are, underwhelmed to say the least. They found it confusing and lacking polish. Its easy to get discouraged at this point, but lets go over an important detail that gets overlooked a lot in games: Consistency.
We as humans learn a lot of things through pattern recognition, and when the patterns aren’t consistent it can be very glaring.
Let’s go over a few things that can turn into flaws in a game: Continue reading
This is your friendly neighborhood Jet here. Nick asked me to write up an article for a comparison between some popular CBS (Custom Battle Systems) scripts for RPG Maker VX.
Unfortunately this is not an announcement for RPG Maker offering a native Mac OS program.
Instead, it’s a fairly inexpensive way to play RPG Maker on your Mac.
Using a free program called Virtual Box (https://www.virtualbox.org/) you can run Windows in a window on your mac.
You’ll still need a copy of Windows but these can be obtained fairly cheaply.
It takes maybe half an hour to get everything set up (including installing windows)
This is a great alternative to a paid program which you may have heard of called Parallels.
Once your set up download a free trial here and get to it!
We’d love to hear how this worked for you. Leave us a comment below!
Until Next Time,
The RPG Maker Team
