1163: The Engine

[Sorry I’ve been lax with the cartoons recently — been blogging late and when I’m tired so haven’t felt inclined to do many. They’ll be back soon.]

As I’ve noted a couple of times recently, I’ve been beavering away at the game I’m making with RPG Maker VX Ace and trying to do a little bit each day. It’s slow progress at the rate I’m going, but it is satisfying to see things coming together piece by piece.

One thing that always impresses me with toolsets like RPG Maker is how active the community is, and how willing they are to help each other out. There’s relatively little in the way of insular thinking, with people wanting to keep all their trade secrets to themselves — quite the opposite, in fact. No, the RPG Maker community is filled with people who create graphical, musical, audible and script…able resources for public consumption and are more than happy to share them with other aspiring developers out there in exchange for nothing more than a wee credit in the finished game.

It’s a marked contrast to the ridiculous secrecy in other parts of the games industry, which is infested with embargoes and other bullshit to control the flow of information. I think that’s quite interesting. While I get why it happens, I think it’s starting to lose its impact. I’ve mentioned before on a number of occasions how all the reviews for a particular game hitting simultaneously makes me not want to read any of them (and, more often than not, not want to play the actual game ever) but this also goes for carefully-timed announcements and the like. The trouble is that a lot of these announcements are for things that people are expecting. A new Assassin’s Creed — surprise! A new Call of Duty — HOLY SHIT. A new Grand Theft Auto screenshot — STOP THE PRESSES.

Even the mobile sector has ridiculous embargoes in place. This always strikes me as weird given the sheer volume of mobile apps and games that are released every day. Companies are lucky to get their product covered at all in most cases, and enforcing arbitrary restrictions on said coverage can only be counter-productive, surely.

But I don’t want to get on an embargo rant. I just thought the openness of the amateur development community was an interesting contrast to the OMG TOP SEKRIT nature of mainstream game development.

I guess it’s largely to do with the fact that the majority of people tinkering around with stuff like RPG Maker and its ilk are amateur/bedroom developers putting stuff together in their own time rather than as their job. There are exceptions, of course, but the fact that RPG Maker is so easy to get up and running encourages people to give it a shot a lot more than the rather daunting task of learning a programming language and/or how to use an engine like Unreal Engine 3. The fact that there’s a sense of joyous discovery and entering a strange new world of wondrous creativity helps encourage a pleasing sense of camaraderie — plus the people who develop the more well-known scripts and resource banks become mini-celebrities in their own right, which must be nice for them. It’s also something they can potentially put on their CVs, I guess — saying that you’re the person behind one of the most widely-used battle system Ruby scripts for RPG Maker VX Ace may not have quite the same clout as saying you designed Unreal Engine 3, but it must count for something.

I can’t say I’ve gotten overly involved with the RPG Maker community as a whole yet since keeping up with forums always seems like a whole lot of hassle, but I’m certainly very grateful for the hard work of artists like “Archeia” and “Scinaya” and scripters like “Yanfly”, who are helping my game come together one piece at a time. If and when it ever gets finished, they’ll certainly be getting some love from me.