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RPG Maker saved my life.
Gibmaker- 07/20/2012 06:51 PM
- 300 views
It has been almost a month since the last release, so self-imposed vacation is almost over. I have been studiously working on the platforming engine for Forkits, my non-RPG-Maker game which I am writing from scratch in Ruby:
After months of development, the squares at rest remain at rest.
But, how did I learn to program in Ruby?
Why, RPG Maker.
4.5 years ago I downloaded RMXP and made a forum post whining about whether you really HAD to mess with the RGSS script to do anything worthwhile. I didn't know anything about object-oriented programming. And in fact, a decade ago a computer course in high school convinced me that I HATED computers and didn't want anything to do with them.
But because RMXP is gloriously open-source, I started by tinkering. I changed the menu commands to rude words. I figured out how to make the menu appear over the map screen by simply not disposing Spriteset_Map. (Note: This is a bad idea.) I figured out the intricacies of def and initialize and super and < and self just by breaking the code hundreds of times in hundreds of places. I started and abandonned at least two games that would have been THE BEST EVER if only I put in the hours and hours needed to finish them.
Then one day I got an idea. I'd made up a system for a tabletop fan-game of System Shock 2, with some nifty methods for randomly building a world map, and increasing your skills by investing experience points into a small number of attributes that each affected a wide variety of actions. I decided I'd plug this system into RPG Maker since no one ever wanted to play it with me in real life. It would be a "quick" project.
(The joke is that I'm talking about this game and it has been 3 years.)
The code for this game is awful. But thanks to the years of work, and breaking RMXP in more ways than ever before, I had the confidence to download a Ruby shell and start programming a game from scratch:
The squares are still at rest. Yes, it was an achievement when they stopped falling through the ground.
It's going to be great.
And so, this September I'm going back to college for a computer programming certificate so I can quit Starbucks.
Thank you RPG Maker.
Here is what Forkits will look like: http://fav.me/d580qte
After months of development, the squares at rest remain at rest.
But, how did I learn to program in Ruby?
Why, RPG Maker.
4.5 years ago I downloaded RMXP and made a forum post whining about whether you really HAD to mess with the RGSS script to do anything worthwhile. I didn't know anything about object-oriented programming. And in fact, a decade ago a computer course in high school convinced me that I HATED computers and didn't want anything to do with them.
But because RMXP is gloriously open-source, I started by tinkering. I changed the menu commands to rude words. I figured out how to make the menu appear over the map screen by simply not disposing Spriteset_Map. (Note: This is a bad idea.) I figured out the intricacies of def and initialize and super and < and self just by breaking the code hundreds of times in hundreds of places. I started and abandonned at least two games that would have been THE BEST EVER if only I put in the hours and hours needed to finish them.
Then one day I got an idea. I'd made up a system for a tabletop fan-game of System Shock 2, with some nifty methods for randomly building a world map, and increasing your skills by investing experience points into a small number of attributes that each affected a wide variety of actions. I decided I'd plug this system into RPG Maker since no one ever wanted to play it with me in real life. It would be a "quick" project.
(The joke is that I'm talking about this game and it has been 3 years.)
The code for this game is awful. But thanks to the years of work, and breaking RMXP in more ways than ever before, I had the confidence to download a Ruby shell and start programming a game from scratch:
The squares are still at rest. Yes, it was an achievement when they stopped falling through the ground.
It's going to be great.
And so, this September I'm going back to college for a computer programming certificate so I can quit Starbucks.
Thank you RPG Maker.
Here is what Forkits will look like: http://fav.me/d580qte
