[POLL] ARE YOU MAKING A GAME WITH RPG MAKER?

Current Project: Izrand Allure

https://rpgmaker.net/games/12395/

https://unity.itch.io/izrand

What's your main priority with your project? At this point, finishing the damn thing XD

Seriously though, I wanted to show a new large continent in the world of Luxaren, tell a story starring Lynette, a character from Luxaren who didn't really get a resolution, and I've always wanted to do a class-changing RPG ala FF5.

What is your project inspired by? Class system is mostly inspired by FF5, but really any class based game I can get my hands on. Overall I'm just inspired by a big mess of RPGs I've played, always trying to recapture the essence of what an RPG is to me.

How long have you been working on your game? About 5 years at this point.

How far along in it are you? About 65-70% done.

How much time do you spend working on it on a weekly basis? Varies greatly. Some weeks I can put in a few hours each day, some weeks I get almost nothing done, really depends on how reality's treating me, tho I do strive to try to get something done daily if at all possible.

Are you looking to sell your game? The previous game was free. The time/effort/money spent on this one does tempt me to try to sell it, but I don't want to disappoint any fans who are expecting it also to be free. Perhaps as little as "pay what you want" on itch, or perhaps a low price tag if I do a steam release to recoup the Steam fee at least. I dunno, undecided at this moment.

Stealing Unity's format.

Current Project: Thrall

https://rpgmaker.net/games/12859/

https://strak.itch.io/

What's your main priority with your project? Mapping. I've got about 600 hours of mapping left to do.

What is your project inspired by? Borderlands, Mystery Dungeon, Diablo, Hades. I wanted to see if I could create a rarity based random loot system in VX, and it evolved from there. Added procedural dungeon generation with parallax maps, crafting, variable difficulty settings, the works.

How long have you been working on your game? Going on 3 years now.

How far along in it are you? Mechanically? About 90%. Story? Written about 80%, developed about 20%. Mapping? Let's not talk about that.

How much time do you spend working on it on a weekly basis? I would LIKE to put about 15 hours a week in. I usually get about 5 - 8.

Are you looking to sell your game? Nope. Unless I can get commercial licenses for the graphics, custom music that is streamer friendly, and ideally more modern settings like rebindable controller configurations, resolution settings, maybe a switch port. But that would basically require switching engines entirely, as I'm building this in VX. No, not Ace. VX, the OG unsung prince.

On multiple versions (2k/3, MZ and Ace are the main ones). One day I will finish them.

The 2k/3 is a remake mapping project and a farm-based one... kinda.

MZ - there's a few

Ace, also a few.

Oh and an MV one.

I don't know how to focus

Current Project: Pavane: See No Evil in RPG Maker MV. No game page yet but soon!

What's your main priority with your project? I wanted a side project to work on while my big main project, a Ren'Py game, is having its art worked on by the folks I commissioned. It's taken a little longer than expected so I decided to try and go back to my explorer horror roots and make a shorter game accessible to content creators and the like in the meantime.

What is your project inspired by? It's a psychological horror inspired by Silent Hill and older RPG Maker horror games. This game and a few other ideas I eventually discarded were ultimately inspired by the fear of things and people not being what/who you think they are, and the fear that horrible things are happening without your knowledge.

How long have you been working on your game? Since last Thanksgiving, so a little over 3 months.

How far along in it are you? ~15% to 20% done. It's a pretty straightforward process but I had to get my sea legs back using an RPG Maker engine after working on Ren'Py for so long lol. I also still need some key artwork before I have enough content for a demo.

How much time do you spend working on it on a weekly basis? ~10 hours per week on average, mostly on weekends since I work a 9-5.

Are you looking to sell your game? Yes! I'm probably going to keep it under $5 though. I'm not looking to "make it big" with my games and have a career that more than helps me afford the game dev hobby at the scale I'm making them (read: super cheap. "Prom Dreams" cost a little over $12 total to make lmao).

What Are You Working On?
Wrapping up Monopolo’s Remastered Edition (shut up, don’t laugh) and a mystery game that I can’t get too much into detail about right now, as that might spoil the surprise!

Are You SERIOUSLY Still Working On Monopolo, Dude?
(…Shut up.)

What's Your Main Priority With Your Projects?
Finishing it, releasing it (AGAIN…) and finally being free... As for the mystery one, just trying to get as much progress done on it as humanly possible and hope for the best at this point. No rush.

What Are Your Projects Inspired By?
Well, Monopolo basically IS Monopoly but with more custom rules added to it, quality of life changes that weren't in the original, new modes and options, fixing up some of the bugs that were in the original release that sometimes caused the game to hang (especially when CPU players were in jail and trying to do multiple different things at once, or trying to get out of jail for some odd reason), and many other things without going too overboard.

I remember wanting to work on this game initially, back in 2007 (man, that was a long time ago...), when the family and I came over to my Mom’s apartment one day and played the original board game there and, throughout the entirety of the game, while everyone else was getting drunk off their ASS, I was constantly saying throughout the late stages of the game, “Hey, wouldn’t Monopoly be a lot more interesting if it had ‘this?’ Wouldn’t Monopoly be a lot more interesting if it had ‘that?’ And then, a few months later after that, I thought, “Hey, what the hell. Let’s do it.” And the rest is history.

As for the mystery game - again, I don’t want to get too much into right now - but all I can say about it is that it’s based off a combination of two different things, with one being based off something long ago that I always thought had a lot of potential but was a real shame that it never had a chance to flourish or get off the ground due to various circumstances. So I guess it’s up to me now in order to do something about it.

How Long Have You Been Working On Both Of Your Games?
With Monopolo’s Remastered Edition - probably almost ten years now…? (lol) And as for the mystery game, I just started working on it last summer while the site was still down, as that was around the time that I came up with this brilliant idea.

You Gotta Be Kiddin’ Me (In Regards To Monopolo)
W-Well, one of my excuses for not having it done by now is that I’m getting quite long at the tooth, and I don’t have as much time (or vigor) to work on it for long hours like I used to, so there!

How Much Time Do You Spend Working On Both Projects On A Weekly Basis?
Ooo! That’s a good one.

Well, now that the Vancouver Canucks are hot garbage and not worth watching anymore, and until they happen to trade Elias Pettersson and everyone else from the old core and then draft Ivar Stenberg or Gavin McKenna at number one, I now work on either project for around 2 - 3 hours a day if I can, so roughly around 15 to 18 hours a week? A mere pittance on what I used to be able to do back in the day.

Lol, I Still Think That You’re Just Too Lazy
Probably… (Maybe.)

Are You Looking To Sell Both Games?
Hmmm… Lemme go check…


"Come on. You know you want to."

N... No.

EDIT: Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that I’m working on both games using good ol’ trusty RPG Maker 2003: the bestest one.

Are you currently actively working on a game with any version of RPG Maker? I've made many games and demos with RPG Makers over the 15 something years I've been at this. Currently though? The future is blurry after my latest project.

What's your main priority with your project? The main priority has always been to make games that I want to play, with characters I want to design, stories I want to tell, and mechanics that interest me. Though lately, I'm learning that I need to do more than this. It's an ever ongoing learning process.

What is your project inspired by? Largely PS2 era JRPGs. Atelier Iris, Mana Khemia, Ar Tonelico, Tales of, Star Ocean, etc. With some GBA era stuff mixed in. My inspirations are pretty constant, and haven't really changed since the 2000s. I'm still chasing that magical feeling from back then.

How long have you been working on your game? My last project was 5 years. That journey ended last November. Though I have made update patches. I have one more patch in me before I call it done for good. Currently, I'm in preproduction for a new project. It's still early, so I'm just writing and making sprites while thinking.

How far along in it are you? Currently, only a month or two. I want to get started prototyping soon, but honestly, I'm not in a rush. Going to take my time with this one.

How much time do you spend working on it on a weekly basis? Very non-committal for now. Not to say I'm not taking it seriously, but I'm not going to rush ahead and burn myself out. I just got out of a 5 year project. I'm good ambling along for now.

Are you looking to sell your game? Yeah I'll sell this next one too. However long it takes to develop. I've put myself into this commercial game gauntlet long ago. I'm determined to make it work. Haven't yet, but one day. One day for sure, right?

Are you currently actively working on a game with any version of RPG Maker?
Yes, I'm using RMMZ after using VX for years.

What's your main priority with your project?
Finishing it is obviously the top one but making it fun is important too!

What is your project inspired by?
Hmm... Final Fantasy X and Type-0, Xenogears with some Babylon mythos thrown in for good measure. Though the visuals take inspiration from mobile titles and art is primarily inspired by manwha; like Elika is nearly a dead-ringer for Hae-in from Solo Leveling XD

How long have you been working on your game?
Nearly 10 months, it will be a year come May.

How far along in it are you?
I have around 190 maps created with around 4 hours of gameplay. But a lot of custom systems still need to be implemented.

How much time do you spend working on it on a weekly basis?
Phew... at one point I was doing 45+ hours a week on top of my day job but I can barely get in 10 hours a week now.

Are you looking to sell your game?
Yes.

It's called: The Sub, but I'm probably going to change it when it's done.

What's your main priority with your project?
Getting all the custom eventing to work properly. It was probably a bad decision to use to rpgmaker 2003 engine, but it's my favourite. And probably a bad decision to make the game a roguelike/lite, meaning much custom stuff.

Also: finishing it.

What is your project inspired by?
An old AGS-game that this guy posted screenshots about from way back. It looked really cool, with a grungy world in like a subway filled with blood. There was never even a demo. It was eventually canceled. But it stuck with me, because its style was really striking.

I always found it sad that such a cool game never was realized.

How long have you been working on your game? How far along are you?
Probably a few years, but I work on it for a while and then work on something else. RPGs are always hard to finish. Too many parts to balance. I'm probably 2/3 finished. At least for a functioning beta. So in reality 1/4.

How much time do you spend working on it on a weekly basis?
Depends. Sometimes more, sometimes less.

Are you looking to sell your game?
Yeah, probably. I'm thinking about selling the final game and making a shorter free side-game as a stand-alone story. Like I did with Toymaker.

Are you currently actively working on a game with any version of RPG Maker?
No, I'm using a wholly extinct engine called the RPG Toolkit. Well, mostly just the Board Editor portion; everything else is built from nothing by me. It's largely based on Java, apparently, so theoretically porting wouldn't be completely impossible, but I see so little to gain from doing so.

I have considered multiple times shifting to something else, mostly out of fears due to it being unstable or nonfunctional on other/future machines, but time and a few small tweaks have ultimately gotten me out of those snags. Ultimately, it has always my own ineptness holding the game back, not the engine.


What is your project inspired by?
Here's probably a weird answer. While Good/Evil choices aren't really new, Mass Effect 1 tried to sell the idea of less Good/Evil (though it does that too, perhaps poorly), but more there'd be consequences based on WHEN you do missions. In reality it does jack-shit with the idea; Liara says something a little different if she's gotten late, and some colonists on Feros are already dead if you do it late, that's about it.

Anyway, I looked at that concept, said I could do way, way better, and worked on an RPG with nine regions, that can be done in any order, with the scenarios around them changing over time, typically every third artifact. In the end, it might not've been as ambitious as it sounds, but there are several spots in the game that can get hugely complex, where like eight fairly different versions of an event can play out, based on what other artifacts you've done and who you've met.

There was also a loose Mega Man weapon-advantage idea, where like you get the Fire character from one dungeon to use to blaze through the Grass Dungeon, which gives the Earth character and so on. As more party members got added, more spells, and more enemy variety, this idea is technically there, but so fuzzy it might as well not exist.

On the combat side... I'm not sure I have a real answer. The 2x4 grid does superficially resemble Mega Man Battle Network, but it's not action at all, nor had I played that sub-series, so that's mostly a coincidence. I think my answer is honestly Fire Emblem, with more emphasis on placement and range and generally smaller numbers.

Actually, I can add that Fire Emblem and Darkest Dungeon came up with the answer of battle animations. Or, the lack of them. When I learned that just about everyone turns FE's super-slick battle animations off to save time, I thought that players this deep into the net didn't care about animations, just numbers and gameplay. Seeing Darkest Dungeon's sharp, single-frame battle animations gave me a middle ground to not waste player time on long animations (not to mention my own time dealing with 500+ enemies), but still show SOMETHING.

I dunno that I played all that many RPGs before 2010, aside from like Pokemon and Paper Mario, so any initial influence isn't from FF4-6 or other NES/SNES/PS1-era RPGs. Etrian Odyssey might be my favourite RPG series now, but mechanically it borrows very little from that. I think if I were asked what big franchise it's most like, I'd have to say Octopath Traveler, although that's obviously something that postdates my work, and it's more world/non-linearity/scenario-design than anything to do with gameplay.


What's your main priority with your project?

As mentioned above, I think I did an acceptable job with the nonlinearity + story + changing areas front. It's not a work of art or anything, but I at least haven't seen something more ambitious on that front. I mean, the idea that you're missing out on at least 66% of the game every time is total anathema to modern game design.

On the Battle System front, I still find minor hiccups or balance concerns every couple of hours of playtesting, but I think the foundation is very solid, and, again, very unique.

As for the desperate, almost manic desire to feel like making the game wasn't a tremendously awful usage of my time, and that it was actually enjoyed by someone, uh, that part hasn't gone so great. Coupled with my paranoid nature and unfortunate tendency to self-destruct under pressure, it makes uploading stuff hellish on me to actually do.


How long have you been working on your game?
Like 16 years.

How far along in it are you?
At this point, the core game has been done for like four years.

I've been going back and adding systems I had to originally cut, like passive abilities, extra costumes, more enemy variety, more animations, and skipped ideas for sidequests. Not to mention there's a mountain of bugtesting involved with a nonlinear game, to say nothing of balancing the behemoth.

There is some idea stirring from time-to-time to get the battle system and associated systems into a final, refined state, then reuse them into various concepts of class-based systems on strategy/boardgame-like maps, focusing on multiple short skirmishes between allied and enemy teams, but, like, I'm taking 16+ years on this. I will literally unironically be dead before I'd finish another game at this rate.


How much time do you spend working on it on a weekly basis?
Ideally, I've got a couple of hours a night where I can work on it. In reality, that usually amounts to twenty minutes of work on some part I didn't actually plan to work on that night, interspersed with doing literally anything else to avoid work on the scary, complicated parts I should be adding or overhauling.


Are you looking to sell your game?
Pfffffft. I tried doing several somewhat desperate contests where I make stuff for people who play the game, either get their characters in the game, or just art of literally whatever they want, in hopes of garnering some interest. Those all failed to generate anything. I literally couldn't pay people to play this. How could I possibly think I could sell it?

Yep, I've got an active project in RPG Maker MV called The Legend of Emilar

My goals for this project cover five core concepts:
1. Push MV as far as I think I can make it go mechanically. There will be a lot of deep gameplay systems, huge character build potential, and a properly reactive world that leans on "controlled freedom" as little as possible.

2. To give my own take on a classic story archetype that refuses to play into the "power fantasy" aspect that so many RPGs have these days. You're just some dude from some town in some country. No chosen ones here.

3. Gameplay design based on the Golden Age of RPGs, but with modern updates, insights, and evolution on those mechanic ideas. Designing things from the standpoint of someone playing the game, not from a game designer perspective.

4. Not wasting the players time by implementing numerous tools/settings/mechanics that allow players to tailor the grinding in the game to what they feel like doing during that play session. Or if players feel stuck on some section, they can be used to alter the difficulty or help with some level grinding.

5. Building a world and game that is reactive to and reflective of the player's actions. Making many choices have real impact, not in simple dialog changes but impacting the story, changing the world state for the better, or worse, and even turning allies into enemies.


This project is inspired by many games from many genres for different reasons. The big ones are Chrono Trigger, FF7, FFX, Persona. These games influenced my decisions on the combat system, character building, relationship mechanics, and general setting for the world.

There are others that were influential on specific mechanics like Factorio (crafting), Mass Effect (dialog systems), Chrono Cross/Tales of Legendia (character systems), and Expedition 33 (reconfirming to me that games w/ heavy mechanics/story theming still have an audience)


I've been working on this game for a little over 21 years now. I started in RPG Maker XP in 2005 and transitioned to MV when it released in 2015. When you zoom back out to include the world/story, I've been working on it since 2003.


I am currently about 8% done with the game currently in terms of the game itself. Though I have the entire story plot outline done, most of the alternate story paths finished, and I am working on finishing off the outline for the true ending path. All of the lore needed for the story has been completed and refined, so I'm working on the lore backing for side content now.

I've been putting any further in-editor development on hold while I refine all of the game mechanics and get them implemented instead of playing whack-a-mole as new ideas pop up. I will be doing a lot of custom coding and rewriting parts of the engine to implement those mechanics.


I spend much less time a week than I would like to on the project as I am currently working on a text-based RPG game within Discord for a DND community. That project's been on-going since 2022 and eats a lot of my free time and I also have a full-time job as a SWE. I try to at least get something done every week, even if it's just fleshing out more lore, writing lore stories around specific major events, or writing up documentation for a game system.

I've built up a tremendous amount of lore over the years, covering 400+ pages of general notes on places, histories, people, and so on, along with several novelizations of specific major events. Some of these are quite big; for example a book called The Dorgal War that follows the events of a war between the United Nations of Gol and the Duchy of Tarkaan, two major world powers, spans several hundred pages. I have similar novelizations on other major events revolving around each nation, how they came to be, and the events that shaped them.


Yes, this will be a commercial project with a free demo that covers the entire prologue for the game. There will be five routes through the prologue that impact many things throughout the game in terms of possible recruits, the amount of trust placed in you, and more. The main route is about 5-8 hours long based on the current state of the prologue.

Progress will carry forward and the demo will be mechanically complete, so on top of the 5 routes, there's also 10 difficulties to choose from that all play differently due to how difficulties will change the game mechanics. The plan is for a 45 to 60 hour story with at least 40 hours of optional content. Currently thinking of a $20 price point.