That's not a dramatization, a lot of games are seriously that bad or worse... Thankfully I'm more of a writer than a game developer, so that's at least one bullet that I've dodged, lol
Honestly just that scene you showed encapsulates the feeling of 2000s rpg maker SO WELL I've never seen it before in my life, but it feels iconic! The punctuation and writing, the interior mapping with no logical consistency, zero thematic coherence, the random NPC taking a slow stroll mid-cutscene directly into a wall... It's perfect!
@@CharlotteLfleur Finished the mapping, but I don’t have sound effects for much other than opening a door 😅 I know how I want the story to go, since I’ve been writing for 11-12 years now :D it’s been an ongoing series in my head for so long lolol. I know it’ll sell too >:D and I’ll be able to help so many people.
My game has a lot of lore; I've been working on it for 10 months; could you give me a tip on how to create a book or large chunks of text, if possible?
The best way I could think of the top of my head of is through using Show Picture but let me see if I can come up with something that's a little easier in-engine!
After looking at this a bit more, I think a more the most elegant way would be to use Show Picture but Show Scrolling Text feature would be great or what you want to do. I'll get a tip video out on this tomorrow!
A better way of writing the first line would be “Hm..? Oh hi Robot! What’s your name? My name is Alex, What brings you here?” It feels more alive than before
“You’ll pay for what you did to my sister. She’s fired from the mafia and since you did it I’ll burn you to dusk” That quote will be in my rpg with this banger.
i've been told i write some pretty good dialogue. i just imagine a conversation between two people in my head and then i write it out on a sheet of paper to see if it looks as good as it sounded in my head. if u have a friend, tell them everything there is to know about a character and ask them to roleplay as that character and have a conversation with them
“Hello! Im Alex“ “Hey, Im Robot!“ “So What Has Brought You Here Today, Robot?“ “Vayxlaz The Evil Wizard Has Been Burning Down Cities And Houses!“ “Oh This Is Bad!! Quickly, Lets Go!“ *New Quest Unlocked: Save The Town From Vayxlaz!*
Serious question but can you make western style RPGs in RPG maker? By western RPGs I mean stuff like Fallout games aka RPGs with heavy emphasis on player choice and consequences with unique skill, perk, traits system etc. Or would it be too big of a burden for beginner like me to implement gameplay features from Fallout 1,2 into RPG maker XP?
The quick answer is yes you can make a game with player choice systems like that. One of the things you do more than most in RM is make conditional branches. A conditional branch is something like: if the player says this one thing do this, if they say something else do something else. You can use variables and switches to keep track of the choices that they've made along the way. This is pretty intuitive and easy to manage in the engine. However I would say depending on how deep you want to go, it would be a burden regardless of what engine you use because there's so much to account for when you want deep player choice systems that affect a lot of other things in the game. As far as perks, traits, and skills you can most certainly do this kind of thing in the vanilla engine but it looks very bland and uninteresting. The cool thing about RMs since RMXP is that programmers in the community can add this kind of functionality while making it look very appealing and you can import it to your game. This is incredibly easy to do in the newer MZ engine. All that being said, I personally find doing the things you're describing inside of RM to be very easy to both do and to understand!
Roobot: ...what is wrong with you? Huh? Uh. Water spell, you just learned it right? Lets get out there and put out the fires! O-okay. My backstory for this silly short example: he reacts this way because he doesn't like the village or villagers due to them treated him poorly his entire childhood. For that, he has trouble empathizing and he doesn't feel bad that the village is on fire. But Roobot is expecting him to do the heroic thing and save the village and the people. The thanks they give are hollow and he feels nothing; roobot is oblivious to the lies. Of course he would be. He didn't know these people like he did. It would be an interesting pair that the human struggles with empathy with a robot who is its natural stat of being an empathetic, sympathetic character.
This is why I write the story on a document before writing any in game dialogue. I just paste in most of the text, I hate dialogue that is not properly formatted.
Why I’m glad I was a writer and already have a literal story of ideas/time spent developing my characters, I can easily make the dialogue be a reason people stick around. It’s just, can I get around to actually making the game? 😂
You would think it's no-brainer, but you'd be surprised that this bare-bones understanding needs to be said. Granted some aspiring kids (younger than 12) may not always realize how important good/well worded writing is if the games they've played are so good it seems easy, or they find the errors funny or endearing. Anyone older might not even think about it or realize how much it genuinely matters that the games have good, well worded dialogue. Some are really better at crafting worlds and having great lore baked into it; to have an over arching narrative. but then struggle with the more normal, intimate group of people journeying through that world, coming up with personal relationships, harships, interactions between each other, the world, or obstacles that happens to the party specifically while following the rules of that world, and society they set. Tropes should be a suggestion, a guideline, not a crutch to grab the lowest branch with, so you don't have to put much effort into writing the character and the typical arc they might go through. The lead protagonist not changing much is not inherently bad, there's just a lot of games with that kind of protagonist and that eventually gets boring.
You know, most of the time I got into these games with bad dialogues or bad writing issues. Yet the way I tolerate them better it’s because I take them to have a small laughter by using my cradle’s tongue. Latam Spanish.
Honestly that’s one thing I’m really really anal about is my own writing. If I even see one typo, I have to release a patch immediately or change it if it sounds bad.
"Alex, wake up!" "What's wrong Ruu-bot?" "There's a fire outside, someone is trying to burn down the village!" "What!?" "It's a good thing you learned water magic, if you hurry you can save the village."
@@runthemc Yes that's true if you just want to build a game as a hobby! It's just a bit sad to see how much these resources are used in Steam released games. It's not even all that hard to make Undertale or Stardew Valley type graphics. I'm sure a lot of ppl can do it if they work on it for a week or two!
@@robertjag167 Definitely agree with you! Back when I was really into XP I tried my hand at making battler graphics and custom sprites and was really surprised at how much I enjoyed it! There's a lot of good resources out there as well to help learn, maybe I should highlight those in a future short 🤔
@@runthemc Yeah it's tons of fun! And 3 cycle animations are pretty easy to do. My heart has been mostly with rm2k3 so I love those assets the most. I would assume they are a bit easier to do than XP ones also! And yeah for sure! Would love to see some shorts on how to make basic 3 cycle walk animations for instance. I would love to make tutorials like this as well.
Urgh, I hate dialogue like this... not meaning to boast (much) but I'm such a stickler for quality, I'm incapable of this kind of writing. I'm rereading and editing this comment to make it less crap, multiple times!
I feel like RPG Maker has gotten a little bit of a bad name because of games made like this example you've shown. RPG Maker is not a bad engine by any means, but usually people just don't use it right/don't try very hard.
Fr! I’m implementing an ABS battle system in my game (because turn based has been done to death by poorly made games) and it’s been that extra level up from typical gameplay. It’s made making my RPG a LOTTTT more fun. There’s so much you can do with the engine. I do get that you shouldn’t use 5M+ plugins, but a lot has been done to ensure you can expand past the basic engine without breaking your game