RPG Maker and learning game design
I have been making a game with Rpg maker MZ in my free time. It is a slow process, but it is coming along. With no background or experience with coding, I had attempted to jump into Unity a while ago, but quickly became overwhelmed and gave up. Rpg Maker has felt like a great onboarding for learning game design. The simplicity of making events, adding in sprites, sound effects, dialog and anything else you want is amazing. I've gone from googling how to do the simplest of things, and now have a full town with npcs, a dungeon with puzzles and a few quests, and usually able to figure out any problems on my own. It feels like my own little world. I even have a small discord that I post updates to and get suggestions/comments from friends and family.
I think when I am done with this demo, I may give Unity another shot. I feel like I have a much better understanding of how to think when designing a game. I know Unity is a much bigger step, but I feel like I can at least see the staircase now.
So I guess my question for you is, what other programs have been instrumental to your game design journey? Have you used Rpg Maker and what are your thoughts on it?
Godot is another engine you should give a try as well, it is a lot simpler than Unity and pretty powerful in terms of what it can do. A pretty big community and documentation and tutorials.
At the end of the day, learning basic coding skill will give you great returns in terms of what you can achieve irrespective of what underlying framework or engine you're using. Unity uses C# and Godot uses GDScript as the primary language (which is simpler) and also provides support for C#, if you want.
If you want to spend sometime improving your coding chops, give something like LÖVE2d a shot as well. It's a 2d game engine for Lua.
I am currently writing a set of tutorials to use Bevy (a rust gaming engine framework), but that is a lot more involved in terms of coding, and learning Rust for a new developer may be a steep learning curve.
Seconding Godot! I just started learning gamedev this year and I'm really enjoying using Godot. I appreciate that it's free, open source, and lightweight yet powerful. I don't have any background in coding aside from basic HTML/CSS/PHP, and a tiny bit of Python. It was enough to be able to learn and use GDscript, which I find very approachable and intuitive. I learned from YouTube tutorials. So far I've been able to publish four tiny games (more like prototypes) on itch.io.
(I haven't tried other game engines yet. I've gotten comfortable with Godot and will continue using it for now.)
That is awesome!
It's great that we have so many opensource and freely available frameworks and resources now, but also oftentimes it is easy to get lost in what language/framework/engine to use and stall out or lose interest in building the games you want to make!
Use whatever works as long as you're able to make things you want to make (and are having fun)!
However, breaking out of your comfort zone and imposing hurdles of a different framework or engine can also help you gain new perspectives, which can help you in your default comfort zone :)
I'm curious about https://ctjs.rocks/ so that's what I'll try next if ever! It uses Javascript-- a language I've never really been able to wrap my head around :)) but we'll see.
Thank you for the encouragement!
Congrats on the 4 releases! I will definitely have to check out Godot, it sounds a lot like what I am looking for.
Very cool! I was recently looking into both RPGM and Godot to see if I could make a small video game out of the tabletop tactical dice game I designed last year (it's very basic, I don't think making a video game out of it would be a huge undertaking). But I was a little intimidated by the coding aspect of Godot, as I'm in the same boat as you--HTML/CSS and an extremely rudimentary level of Python, no real development experience. Encouraging to see that it might be enough to pick up GDscript and not feel like I'm starting completely from scratch, as I really like the open-source and platform-agnostic nature of Godot. And I don't think RPGM would work for this style of game anyway.
I have not heard of Love2d, but will definitely check it out when I get home! My main goal is to finish this demo, but once that is done I'm going to get into a stronger engine and make some real bad flappy bird and mario clones.
I used rpgmaker a long time ago for a very short time, but the main learning tool was gamemaker 8.1 lite. But I didn't learn actual programming until years later. The most I did was paste scripts from online to bypass lost features.
If your problem with Unity was writing code then you're still gonna have that issue. Learn C# first then come back to it.
If C# is too complicated, you can take a look at godot as an alternative to unity since it defaults to a much simpler, python-like programming language for the game scripts.
Gamemaker and Unreal's blueprints are quite user friendly. Gamemaker is probably the most beginner friendly of the 'serious' engines, but also the most limited. I think they have a free version.
With Unreal, you can make good, fully fleshed out games without writing a single line of code.