Probably one of the most important things you’ll have to decide before making the game is what engine is most appropriate to do so in. For the longest time, I found making this choice very overwhelming, and I struggled with figuring out which would be most appropriate for me.
There are many choices out there for game development in 2020. There are the engines geared towards people who aren’t coders, such as RPG Maker and Game Maker Studio. There are the very popular engines such as Unity or Unreal. And then there are the more niche, open source engines like Godot or Ren’Py. I considered all of these engines as potential choices for game creation, but the main two I’ve given more than a cursory glance towards were Godot and RPG Maker.
Godot
Godot is an open source game development engine that is quickly growing in popularity. I was interested in this engine because its main coding language is GDScript, which is very Python-like in nature. A career goal I have is to improve at using Python, so it seemed like killing two birds with one stone. Another perk of the engine is that it’s very versatile, so you can do a lot of different things with it if you’re willing to figure the logic of the system out.
I used Godot for roughly two months and tried to immerse myself in the lingo. I learned a lot from doing this about the important things that go into making a game, as well as ways to code more efficiently. The first time I was able to animate a character to walk how I wanted them to and to see it on the testing screen, I was thrilled and felt like I accomplished something great.
However, despite putting a lot of free time into learning the engine, my progress was quite slow. Given that I wanted to make a pretty involved 2D JRPG, I eventually decided that Godot wasn’t the right choice. I didn’t necessarily have an issue with coding my game out from scratch, and I experienced first-hand just how satisfying it could be to build from scratch. But I realized that making a game takes a lot of effort and that a heavy coding engine was going to make any progress I made much slower. I don’t have all the free time in the world to build a game, and once I realized that a lot of the time I was spending in Godot was something very similar that RPG Maker provided out of the box, it seemed more cost-effective to switch engines.
RPG Maker
RPG Maker is game making option for people who don’t have a lot of experience coding. The engine has a stigma to it, because many games made with it use stock assets and don’t do anything compelling to make the world stand out. You lose a lot of freedom and flexibility you’d get otherwise if you had just used a more robust game engine.
However, there are some very worthwhile upsides:
Restraints are great for encouraging creativity. With Godot, I was regularly sidetracked by realizing “oh, I can do this cool thing!” and ultimately didn’t end up making any meaningful progress on a real project. I had a lot of ideas, but I wasn’t channeling them into anything. RPG Maker cuts a lot of those ideas out with its design and forces me to think about what I really need in a game.
Things can be done much faster. All the different aspects you want built into a true game need to be built from scratch in Godot. That is, you need to create the ability to walk, collisions, a dialogue system, inventory, menus… and a bunch of other stuff that I didn’t even get to in my quest to learn Godot because I still had so many basics to learn. RPG Maker has a lot of this built in, and if you know your way around the engine you can customize it so it looks less generic. For example, it took me a week to get my character sprite to animate properly in Godot - figuring out how to do that took me 10 minutes in RPG Maker.
Great games have been made in RPG Maker by small teams. Just look at these games:
- LISA The Painful
- To the Moon (and its sequel Finding Paradise)
- OneShot
- Corpse Party
When I realized that any game I made would probably not deviate too far from those in its mechanics, it pretty much sold me on the fact that I should switch game engines.
Conclusion
I still haven’t put a ton of time into RPG Maker and certainly can’t speak to whether it’ll be the ultimate option I go with for all my future game development, but for the time being I think it’ll be my main choice. A new version of RPG Maker (MZ) has recently released, and I decided to hop on board with it to see what I can come up using it.
Next time, I will cover the adventures of me trying to learn pixel art!