2385: What a Difference a Light Makes

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A fairly quick one tonight as I’m suddenly very tired, but I’ll make it a “Pete’s RPG Maker Game Teaser” post just to make up for it, or something.

I thought I’d talk a little about lighting effects, because they make a huge difference to the overall look and feel of a game (or part of a game’s setting) and can add a lot to the overall personality of something you’re making.

More than anything, lighting effects can be a huge contributing factor in ensuring your game doesn’t look like “just another RPG Maker game”, which is by far the most common criticism of games made with RPG Maker. Hey, you provide people with tools, they’re gonna use them, sometimes lazily.

Anyway. Yes. So far as I’m concerned, the best ways to make your game not look like “just another RPG Maker game” without actually replacing the built-in graphics is a combination of fiddling with lighting effects (and screen tints to go with them) and tweaking the user interface so it’s no longer recognisable as the default RPG Maker battle system. (Of course, there’s nothing wrong with just using the default bits and bobs while you’re learning, but once you start feeling ambitious, it’s a good idea to try and put your own personal stamp on the project, and the easiest way to do that is through careful selection of audio-visual assets.)

So here are a few comparison screenshots of a map in the RPG Maker editor, which doesn’t show lighting, and in the game itself (which also features elements of the UI).

Here’s how a security computer room looks in the editor. (The checkerboard background means there’s nothing there. If you set up a parallax background, it will appear where the checkerboard is; otherwise if will simply render as black in the game.)

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And here it is in game, using a lighting plugin for adjustable, colour-able light radiuses wherever you like on your maps. Makes some really nice atmospheric effects.

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Here’s a house (currently with no door, because I haven’t made the inside yet) in the editor:

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And here it is in game, the simple addition of a transparent “sunbeams” overlay image giving it a bit more life:

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Here’s the edge of a swamp in the editor:

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And here it is in game, featuring a moving “mist” overlay image, plus a change to the screen tint that gives it a slight purple hue as well as desaturating the colours a bit:

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Finally, here’s part of a forest labyrinth in the editor:

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And here’s the dramatically different presentation in game, featuring an adjusted screen tint and a tiled overlay to simulate the leaf canopy blocking out sunlight:

Screenshot 2016-08-01 02.30.26

I know to all the jaded pros out there it probably still looks like “just another RPG Maker game”, but given that I’m mainly using this project to experiment with the software and see how easy it is to put a complete experience together, I’m happy with the twists on the standard look and feel I’ve got going on so far.

More teasers in the coming weeks.

2368: Building a World… Again

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Playing with RPG Maker MV as I am at the moment, I’m reminded of quite how much I enjoy building worlds. I don’t have the skill or technical knowledge to be able to do so using 3D modelling tools (or even level editors for 3D games) but I’ve always felt I can put together some interesting 2D maps for RPGs.

There are two main approaches you can take when building a world for a game. You can take the “realistic” approach and attempt to build it to something approaching a believable scale, or you can take the “gamey” approach and try to build something that works well in the context of a game.

In actual fact, I tend to find that the best approach is somewhere between the two. A certain degree of game design is necessary when building a world in order to prevent it feeling like an unfocused mess — many modern open-world games fail miserably at this — while at the same time if your world design is completely divorced from reality your players will constantly be aware that they are playing a game rather than immersing themselves in your fictional world.

This isn’t always a bad thing, of course. Some people very much prefer exploring something that has been crafted to be fun, interesting to explore and well-paced. Others, meanwhile, like to wander off the path at every opportunity and see what’s in that cave, over that hill, behind that locked door. And some of the most satisfying gaming experiences I’ve had have come in environments very obviously designed to defy all real-world logic (not to mention architectural principles and, well, physics) — Metroidvania-style titles particularly spring to mind in this regard.

Since the game I’m playing around with at the moment is a kind of grand experiment of sorts, I’m going to play around with a variety of different approaches. The concept of the game sees the party travelling to several different “worlds”, so each of them are going to be structured differently. One of them will be a condensed fantasy RPG-style world, with the distinction between “overworld” and “dungeons”. Another will be one big dungeon — probably a haunted mansion or something along those lines. Besides those, I’d like to do something interesting with a sci-fi/cyberpunk feel, and either something completely abstract or very much grounded in reality. Or perhaps both.

Unlike past projects, where I’ve sort of “winged it” as I’ve gone along, this time around I’m actually taking a bit of time to plan things out to a certain degree. I imagine there will still be an element of winging it as I play around and think of new things I’d like to do, but at the very least I intend to plan out the basic structure and/or map of each of these “worlds” and how the player will interact with them. Then it will be interesting to see how much of a challenge it is to implement each of them using the RPG Maker MV toolset.

So far, the game’s introduction has a single, linear “dungeon” to introduce the player to the basic concepts. After that, I intend to allow them to choose how they progress through the initial phases of the game — though I also intend to put in some systems to ensure some jumping back and forth between the different worlds and their corresponding styles is in order. Should keep things interesting. We’ll see, I guess.

2364: More MV

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I’ve been playing some more with RPG Maker MV today. Despite telling myself before I started fiddling around that I wasn’t going to be too ambitious, my project’s plugins folder is now full to bursting with all manner of goodies to extend the functionality of the basic engine and basically make it almost unrecognisable from its vanilla form. (This is good, because “it looks like an RPG Maker game” is considered a grave insult by some people on the Internet.)

I’m not going to share any specific details about the game I’m putting together to learn the program as, if it ever gets finished, I want it to be a nice surprise for my friends to enjoy (but hopefully a certain amount of appeal to those of you who don’t know me quite so well, also). However, I can talk a bit about some of the plugins and goodies I’ve been making use of.

An absolutely essential site for those wanting to go beyond the basic functionality of the RPG Maker MV engine is the MV Plugins Master List. It is, in theory, a central repository of links to the most popular RPG Maker MV plugins, along with snippets of information about them. This was my starting point for exploring the world of plugins.

RPG Maker veterans will be familiar with the name Yanfly, no doubt, as he’s one of the most active users of the program’s various incarnations, and has long been producing some of the most well-regarded plugins and scripts out there. His new site is absolutely rammed with fantastic plugins, all of which are well documented and easy to use. Of particular interest to many people will be his implementations of the popular ATB and CTB battle systems from the Final Fantasy series; when used in conjunction with other plugins to alter how the battle screen looks and works, it’s easier than ever to put together a really distinctive looking game with easily understandable mechanics.

Himeworks is another great resource for plugins. Not only does Tsukihime produce some excellent, again well-documented plugins, she (I think?) is also an active member of both the RPG Maker community in general and the community on her own site, offering helpful advice and accepting feedback for her plugins through the comment sections.

Aekashics has some great resources, this time mostly visual ones for use in battle or as appropriate throughout your project. Aekashics has a very distinctive style that is nice and consistent between all the different resources available, and they’re all very high quality. If you don’t want to use the default RPG Maker monsters but are as cack-handed as me when it comes to producing artwork, Aekashics’ site should be your first stop.

Here are a few other cool plugins I’ve been using:

PrettyGauges – a delightfully simple plugin that allows you to easily customise the rather amateurish-looking default HP, MP and suchlike gauges in RPG Maker MV.
TerraxLighting – a super-cool lighting system that allows you to use events as light sources on your maps. The radius and colour of the light sources can be adjusted, and they can even be made to “flicker” slightly to simulate fire or electronic screens. Using lighting makes a huge difference to how RPG Maker MV’s default visuals look.
VictorEngine – a series of useful plugins that run a similar gamut to Yanfly’s collection. Where VE wins out over Yanfly is in things like the customisation of visual elements like the battle screen status window and suchlike, whereas many of Yanfly’s plugins are more focused on new or optimised functionality.

I’m having a lot of fun so far. Whatever you might think of RPG Maker-produced games, there’s no denying that the software itself is an extremely fun, creative tool that allows anyone to put together something that will make them happy. It can also be a great jumping-on point to learn coding principles, even if you’re not writing your own JavaScript plugins yourself — the Event system’s pseudo-code is a good way of thinking about how things work and how you tell a computer to do things, but is simple and straightforward enough I bet even my friend James (who, when it comes to technology, is borderline retarded, which is strange because he’s otherwise a very clever chap) could make an NPC walk around and call the player a bellend.

1159: WAY More Than Seven Days

Back on Day 793, you may recall that I mentioned I was working on a game and that I was quite enthusiastic about it. Well, it stalled somewhat for various reasons — work, general lethargy, moving house, jury service, many other reasons that aren’t really excuses — but this week I’ve started working on it again, and it’s a good feeling.

To be honest, doing what I’m doing was partly spurred on by this painfully accurate article from The Onion. I figured that I’m in a relatively good position right now — financially secure, working in a job which is reasonably challenging at times but which leaves me with plenty of free time — so instead of sleeping until 10-11am (usually unintentionally) I should make use of some of that extra time. As such, I’ve been getting up a bit earlier and, well, making use of some of that extra time.

In the previous post I linked to, I talked about how much I enjoy the world-building aspect of creating a game. Today, I’ve been rediscovering the joy of populating those locales that I’ve created with people. Specifically, the stuff I’ve been working on over the last couple of days has been the first appearance of the story’s main characters, so it’s been an absolute pleasure to see these characters I’ve had in my head (and a Google document) finally appear on screen and act the way I’ve told them to.

I’m going to do that annoying developer thing and not talk in specifics about the project because I’d like some aspects of it to remain a surprise, but I will say a few things about what I’ve achieved so far.

Thus far I’ve got a controllable protagonist and an interactive introduction sequence that introduces her, the setting and the context of the story. I’ve got some sequences where the player is able to make choices and subtly change some of the things that occur next. I’ve laid a few “hooks” for future interactions between the protagonist and other characters, and I’ve put together the story up until the point where the protagonist meets up with the other main characters. And, as I type this, I’ve composed the initial conversations between the protagonist and the other characters — including, again, a few events that change a little bit according to choices that have been made.

I’m deliberately keeping things relatively unambitious with this project, as I would very much like to actually finish it at some point. It’s a concept that I really like and would very much like to carry through to completion, so I’m keen to try and devote some time to it. One thing that was stopping me was a lack of certain art assets that I needed to progress, but now I’ve found those (or at least got some solid placeholders put in) I have, as far as I can make out, everything I need to pick up this project and run with it, motivation and free time permitting. Aside from the art assets I was lacking, most of the other stuff I’m using is either RPG Maker’s built-in content or publicly-available/royalty-free stuff. The somewhat “generic” nature of using built-in and publicly-available assets is entirely deliberate — if and when it’s finished you’ll hopefully see why I chose to go that route. It wasn’t just laziness and/or a desire to get up and running without having to worry about creating custom content — though being able to work with pre-made character sprites and the like certainly makes working on this a bit easier.

I’ll leave it at that for now, and if I make any significant progress that I’m happy to share in the near future, I may drop in a few screenshots here and there. Suffice to say that for the moment, I’m happy with the way things are going and hopefully I’ll have something more to share soon.

1136: Thoughts on RPG Maker

I read this piece by Robert Boyd of Zeboyd Games earlier. Now, I normally agree with Mr. Werezompire on a lot of things, but I take issue with a few things he says about RPG Maker in this article, which was posted shortly after the latest version RPG Maker VX Ace hit the Steam store a while back.

Boyd is quite right to note that this is the first time a piece of software such as RPG Maker has hit a mainstream digital download storefront for PC — past iterations of the software were sold directly by the publisher via a rather cumbersome e-commerce solution, so to get it on Steam is a big step forward in both accessibility and visibility. Boyd is also right to note that lowering the barrier of entry to creating games through tools such as RPG Maker also encourages everyone to want to have a go — and that this can result in a glut of “incomplete, buggy, generic, or downright awful games”. (It also results in people who are otherwise unable to get their heads around programming becoming empowered to realise their own digital dreams and creativity.)

What I take a certain degree of umbrage to is his assertion that it is a “general RPG maker” and thus ill-suited to producing anything more than the most generic JRPG possible. While it is true that the default art assets and music provided with the game are aimed at people who want to get a fairly generic JRPG up and running quickly, the very nature of the software is that it is completely customisable depending on how much “individuality” you want to give your project. You can have something fairly convincing up and running in a matter of minutes using the default assets… but with a bit of time and artistic talent (or at least creativity), you can completely revamp the default “look” to anything you please. Not only that, but by using its built-in Ruby-based scripting language, you can completely overhaul the way the game works — battle system, menus, method of moving around the game world, anything can be modified or added if you know what you’re doing. And even if you don’t, there’s a lively and active community out there that has put together plenty of free scripts for anyone to make use of.

This isn’t “trying to modify RPG Maker to do things it wasn’t really intended to do,” as Boyd asserts. This is, in fact, using RPG Maker in the manner in which it was intended for power users — and it also aptly demonstrates one of the most admirable things about the application: the fact that it is simple and accessible enough for beginners to use, yet powerful and flexible enough for more advanced users to take complete control of. You only have to look at examples like To The Moon and Cherry Tree High Comedy Club, both of which were created in RPG Maker XP (two versions previous to the current edition) to see what is possible — and to be fair to Boyd, he does at least mention these titles in his post.

Boyd makes some fair points in the article, but what I don’t like much is the underlying tone that “if you’re using RPG Maker rather than programming it yourself, you’re doing it wrong.” While it is undoubtedly more satisfying to program your own engine from scratch and see a complete game come together from literally nothing, not everyone has the time, ability and/or C#-speaking friends to be able to do that. Plus if there’s a perfectly good tool already out there to realise what you want to do… why shouldn’t you use it?

#oneaday Day 794: Brilliant Game Idea, No Technical Talent? No Problem!

I’ve mentioned a number of times on this ‘ere blog that I don’t really have the knack of programming. I can sort of do it if I have plenty of reference material to hand or if I’m following a tutorial, but it’s the sort of thing that if I don’t do it regularly, it just all falls out of my head and makes a mess on the carpet.

Despite not being able to program, however, that hasn’t stopped me from wanting to make my own games at times, and I know at least a few of you reading might be interested in how to go about doing that for yourself. So I thought I’d gather a bit of information regarding game maker packages that I’ve used in the past (or at least heard of) in the hope that you might find something that tickles your fancy.

So without further ado, then, here goes.

Clickteam products: Games Factory, Multimedia Fusion

My first experience with making games that weren’t written in Atari BASIC was with Clickteam’s Klik and Play, an application for Windows that allowed you to create games without any knowledge of programming whatsoever. The program actually contained everything you might need to get creating straight away — it included basic art tools, a library of sound effects and music to use in your games as well as plenty of example sprites, background art and interface elements.

Klik and Play’s strength was in its ease of use. Handling all aspects of how a game worked was very much like a logic puzzle, or a series of “If… Then…” statements. For example “If” the player presses the fire button, “Then” the spaceship they control should shoot a missile. “If” an enemy collides with the spaceship, “Then” a fart sound should be played and the player’s lives should be reduced by one.

One great thing that Klik and Play did was provide several means to determine all the possible conditions you might want to test for in your game. You could create the statements manually if you knew in advance what was going to happen, or you could enter the “Step Through Editor”, start your game running and every time something that hadn’t happened before happened for the first time, Klik and Play would ask you what you wanted it to do. After a short while of using this tool, you started to think logically about all the possible things that might happen throughout the course of a single screen of the game you were making, and your efficiency would skyrocket. Of course, even when you know what you’re doing this is still considerably slower than a C++ wizard coding their own routines, but for those of us who always put curly braces in the wrong place, it was a godsend.

The only downside to Klik and Play was that it was fairly limited in what it could do. There weren’t many global variables to store information in, for example, making more complex games difficult to create. And file management for save games and the like was practically non-existent. You were pretty much limited to making simple arcade games — not that this was necessarily a bad thing.

Many of these issues were resolved by subsequent releases in the series. First came The Games Factory, which added more global variables, the ability to have a scrolling screen for levels that were bigger than a single screen in size, and more sophisticated event handling. This was then followed by Multimedia Fusion, which added even more high-end features designed for people who wanted to build full applications and screensavers rather than just games. Most recently, Clickteam have launched The Games Factory 2 and Multimedia Fusion 2 as two separate products (with Multimedia Fusion having a pro-level “Developer” version available) which are available from their official website. The latest versions feature the ability to export to Flash for publication on the Web, and iOS app format. Android and XNA (Xbox 360) support is reportedly on the way.

RPG Maker

I mentioned this yesterday, but it’s worth putting in this list simply because of how full-featured it is. Having gone through a number of previous iterations on both PC and consoles, Enterbrain’s role-playing game construction kit RPG Maker is now one of the most flexible but easy-to-use game making tools on the planet. It doesn’t even have to be a role-playing game that you make with it — if you’re looking to create a visual novel or top-down perspective adventure game, it’s a great solution for that, too.

RPG Maker comes with a ton of preset graphics, sounds and music for you to use in your own games allowing you to get started straight away. All you need to do is draw the maps, write the story and test it out, all of which can be done via the program’s simple interface. Meanwhile, more advanced users can easily add custom graphics, sounds, music, enemies, items, equipment and characters, and people who actually know a bit of coding can even rewrite the game engine using the program’s “RGSS” scripting language to create brand new menu and battle systems. And don’t worry if you don’t have a clue how to do that yourself but find the built-in systems to be not so good — using community-developed scripts has long been an expected part of RPG Maker development. The community is lively, helpful, full of ideas and covers a broad range of talents — so if you have a great idea for a story but have no idea how to write original music or draw custom graphics, you can probably find someone to help you out.

RPG Maker’s latest version is known as RPG Maker VX Ace and is the version to go for out of the three currently available on the official website.

Adventure Game Studio

Free tool Adventure Game Studio allows you to create point and click adventure games of the LucasArts or Sierra ilk. There’s a little bit of a learning curve involved in getting started with this one, and it doesn’t come with many sample resources to get started with, so you’ll have to draw your own graphics (or recruit a friend who knows what they’re doing).

Once you get the hang of it, though, you’ll be able to create convincing point-and-click adventures featuring plenty of dialogue (fully voiced if you have friends willing to step in for voice acting duties) and object-based puzzles. Lest you worry about the quality of a free tool, Adventure Game Studio has been used to create a number of very well-received projects, including the popular Ben There, Dan That! games.

AGS is free, unlike the previous titles on this list. Get it here.

Ren’Py

Ren’Py is a visual novel engine designed for creating combinations of text, music, sound effects and visuals to tell a story. It’s relatively simple to use to get a basic non-interactive story up and running, and a bit of experimentation will get you putting together multi-path adventures with plenty of choices in no time. Like AGS, though, it doesn’t come with many sample resources, so you’d better get handy with a Wacom tablet and scribbling some art before you get started on putting your game together. That or, again, ask a friend.

Despite the inherent (and usually deliberate) limitations of the visual novel genre, Ren’Py is a surprisingly flexible tool. For some great examples of what’s possible with it, check out Christine Love’s three games Digital: A Love Story, Don’t Take It Personally, Babe, It Just Ain’t Your Story and Analogue: A Hate Story, all of which were created using Ren’Py (and all of which employ some fascinating storytelling techniques that are unique to the interactive medium).

Ren’Py is also free. Grab it here.

Other stuff I haven’t tried

There’s a wealth of other free and paid game making software out there, most of which I haven’t tried. Here’s a few you may want to take a look at.

Game Maker from YoYoGames is well-regarded as a flexible tool which can be used to make a wide variety of different games for the Web, standalone release or mobile release.

Stencyl is a tool designed to make it easy to create Flash, iOS and Android games without the need for coding.

GameSalad is a Mac-only product similar to Stencyl, designed for making iOS, Web and standalone games without needing to know coding.

The Game Creators carry a range of products for aspiring developers of various experience levels, ranging from those who have an idea of how to work with BASIC to those who simply want to draw a map for a first-person shooter and run around in it.

If you’ve come across any more, feel free to share in the comments for the benefit of anyone else who may be interested.

#oneaday Day 793: It Takes More Than Seven Days to Build a World

I’m making a game. This is not the first time I have said these words, nor will it be the last time, but I have a good feeling about this one. A vision. Only one past amateur development project I worked on (known as Pie-Eater’s Destiny) was ever completed (twice if you count the subsequent “Gold Edition” remake) and a third (The Adventures of Dave Thunder) was going extremely well but then unfortunately lost when an old computer died without warning. (Note to self: BACK THE FUCK UP) This one, though, feels like an idea that has legs, and I’m looking forward to bringing it to life, to mix metaphors for a moment.

No, you won’t be getting any details on what this project is just yet save for the fact that I’m using it as a means of trying out the latest version of Enterbrain’s excellent RPG Maker software, RPG Maker VX Ace. I’ve used several iterations of this package over the years and each has its own quirks and foibles. Previous version RPG Maker VX turned out to be a bit of a misstep which seemingly stripped out features rather than adding them, but from my limited experience so far, VX Ace seems to be an excellent piece of software with plenty of flexibility.

One of my favourite parts of creating a game — or indeed any story, since I typically have aspirations to create narrative-focused games, even if I never finish them — is creating the world and the characters who populate it. When building a map in RPG Maker, I’ll find myself visualising its context in the world — in the case of a village or town, I’ll think to myself “right, this person lives here, this person runs this shop, follow this path and you’ll get to…” and so on. In the case of a dungeon I’ll resist the temptation to use the random map generator and instead design a dungeon which makes some degree of contextual sense, even if it may descend into bizarreness at times. (The lava flow in the opening “wine cellar” dungeon at the beginning of The Adventures of Dave Thunder was a particular highlight, which our hero lampshaded quite nicely at the time he came across it for the first time, as I recall.)

I’ve always been this way with level construction. The earliest instance I can remember was Wolfenstein 3D, whose map editor gave me many, many hours of enjoyment and, thanks to CompuServe, even netted me $200 when ten of my levels were included in the official Apogee “Super Upgrades” expansion pack for the game. When building my selection of maze-like levels for id’s Nazi-bashing shooter, I enjoyed thinking of the “real” context for these rooms and tunnels. As such, I ended up with some memorable “setpiece” confrontations (or as close as you could get to a “setpiece” in Wolf3D’s limited engine, anyway) — the one that sticks in my mind most is the one where you’ve crept through some moss-filled corridors in search of a Nazi secret base and open a door only to discover that a briefing is apparently in progress. One of the “officer” enemies was standing at the front of the room next to a “map” texture, and the rest of the room was full of the standard trooper soldiers all facing him. (I wasn’t a monster for game balancing; I provided the player with a chaingun and plenty of ammo before sending them in to mow down this little gathering. Hey, I was a teenager. Subtlety wasn’t in my vocabulary.)

The point is, I found myself thinking carefully about every block I put down, every object on the map. Everything had a purpose, a place, a story behind it. I enjoyed visualising that world in my mind and then bringing it to life on my computer screen. It was inordinately satisfying to be able to hoon around a world of my own creation and think this came from my BRAIN. I feel the same way every time I create a new map in RPG Maker, every time I make a track in TrackMania, every time I build something in Minecraft. And if I had any clue whatsoever how 3D level editors worked (I’ve tried and failed numerous times) I have no doubt I’d feel the same way there too.

As you may have gathered, today has been about world-building. I’ve only created a tiny, tiny piece of what will eventually become this game’s world, but already it’s bringing those old feelings back. Hopefully they’ll provide the motivation to take me through to actually finishing a game project for once.