WHAT ARE YOU THINKING ABOUT RIGHT NOW?

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AtiyaTheSeeker
In all fairness, bird shrapnel isn't as deadly as wood shrapnel
5424
I hate being so easily manipulated. I really do. Throughout my life I've been an extremist toward various toxic renditions of benign beliefs. These days it feels like I'll indulge anyone with a sob story and conviction behind it, even if it goes against what I actually believe in. Even my ethics can be skewed like this.
went the whole month of January without drinking because reasons. now doing my first real drinking (I was out last night with friends at a bar but I just had two or three beers which is not enough to really touch me much, even with the blow that I must have dealt to my tolerance with a one-month alcohol break) since then and thinkin' kinda like...man, I enjoy being drunk. like, this is awesome. I missed this. Don't get me wrong, I'm super relieved that I was able to go a month without it and still be pretty sure I'm not an alcoholic like my uncle (RIP) but yeah...

this is nice lol

(I am drinking and gammakking which is okay unlike drinking and driving.)

e: i forget is there a "What are you drinking about?" thread?
Yellow Magic
Could I BE any more Chandler Bing from Friends (TM)?
3154
author=StormCrow
went the whole month of January without drinking because reasons. now doing my first real drinking (I was out last night with friends at a bar but I just had two or three beers which is not enough to really touch me much, even with the blow that I must have dealt to my tolerance with a one-month alcohol break) since then and thinkin' kinda like...man, I enjoy being drunk. like, this is awesome. I missed this. Don't get me wrong, I'm super relieved that I was able to go a month without it and still be pretty sure I'm not an alcoholic like my uncle (RIP) but yeah...

this is nice lol

(I am drinking and gammakking which is okay unlike drinking and driving.)

e: i forget is there a "What are you drinking about?" thread?


Chris, is that you?

Also, here is said thread: https://rpgmaker.net/forums/topics/24316/
Cap_H
DIGITAL IDENTITY CRISIS
6625
Mirak
Stand back. Artist at work. I paint with enthusiasm if not with talent.
9300
that was a fun, nostalgic read
Fates Of Alerha, proudly hosted on photobucket
author=Cap_H
https://thecatamites.itch.io/dictionary-to-the-known-world

W-Whoa, wait - what!?

MONOPOLO:

a strange collision between the screenshot-hype-train and bizarre-technical-follies elements of rpg maker 2003. monopolo was a functioning clone of monopoly, mysteriously made in rpg maker by forum member silver4donuts, which is usually the sort of thing which just gathers mild praise and then gets stashed away in a custom-menu-showcase section of queenscourt.org or something. except in this case it was promoted as though it was a hyperanticipated blockbuster - regular screenshot drops, announcement pages, teaser links, all written up in a series of strangely formatted longform text posts written in a sort of giddy reggie-fils-aime-speak filled with weird winking insinuations, callbacks to previous posts, claims and grand rhetorical asides... and would never stop, bouncing back a week or two after every new round of increasingly aggressive insults and threatened disciplinary action. i remember being sad when the pushback eventually got to a point where it was dumber and more obnoxious than any of the original posts, one of those moments where "fair game" is declared and everyone can giddily go after an approved target. the last i heard a completed monopolo was still sitting on his hard drive somewhere - waiting until the time was right.

Holy shit... I just glossed over all of that and was surprised to find something about Monopolo written on there. I mean, like…holy shit, I never expected to see that! I don’t know whether to take that as faint praise or just utter embarrassment (...maybe it’s a bit of both?)

Either way, still pretty cool. I’m going to enshrine those words and put them right up on my mantle right next my Wisao.

(...God, I'm so lonely...)
I wouldn't feel too glowy about being mentioned about catamites. It's more or less his observations of how weird the rpgmaker community was and it's infatuation of trying to be a pretend game industry. I mean the joke being that the shitposts and screenshots we left behind could contribute to some psychological profile of a squaresoft teenager circa 2005. Then again, the sense of humor of "Nirvana Charset" by itself might be lost on some people.

But on another side, it is interesting to question why the trends within RM became the way they did. Especially with the circumstances leading to GW. I think most of the culture has evaporated by now, and this is probably the closest we got to a written piece summarizing this.
author=Cap_H
Some of you, oldies, might appreciate this:
https://thecatamites.itch.io/dictionary-to-the-known-world

Thank you for sharing this Cap_H!

author=Darken
I wouldn't feel too glowy about being mentioned about catamites. It's more or less his observations of how weird the rpgmaker community was and it's infatuation of trying to be a pretend game industry. I mean the joke being that the shitposts and screenshots we left behind could contribute to some psychological profile of a squaresoft teenager circa 2005. Then again, the sense of humor of "Nirvana Charset" by itself might be lost on some people.

But on another side, it is interesting to question why the trends within RM became the way they did. Especially with the circumstances leading to GW. I think most of the culture has evaporated by now, and this is probably the closest we got to a written piece summarizing this.

Yeah, the current rpgmaker community (outside of RMN) is not like this at all. That's why GamingW is so interesting to talk/think about.
I still want to do a summary at some point that would string all this info together, but this will have to do for now.
(What he mentions about TARG, SCREENSHOTS, FORUMS and OUR NEIGHBORS are the most interesting points - his postscript is also great too)

EDIT: I thought this one was pretty good:
HOSTING:interestingly not considered to be a big deal, which meant most games being stored on a motley network of private hosting domains, upload sites, small-scale "lockers" attached to the forums themselves or on other people's fansites. with the resulting impact on game preservation being what you'd expect. although it could also mean that somebody's copy of Legends Of Alteria Demo or similar will still be sitting safely in an overlooked college server somewhere after all the more wide-ranging and upkeep-intensive hosting sites have once again returned to dust.
I dunno. I thought at least the first half of the postscript could fairly accurately be applied to today's RMN:

i hope it gives a sense of the kind of fishbowl insularity that stands out most about the small game development scenes of that period, before they were all retroactively pulled into the wake of a single "indie movement", and when they were largely not paying attention to that movement.

...idea of people making indie games without knowing or caring what others were simultaneously doing in art or music or comics or writing...

That the "indie movement" took off means everyone is pretty aware that there are larger and bigger spaces out there, but I still feel like there's a solid percentage of RMN games that are only made for the RMN community. (this applies more strongly to RMN than to RM in general if only because RM games are considered commercially viable now but isn't at all specific to RMN.) And this isn't including games that were made without any audience in mind just as self-expression -- I mean games clearly designed to have an audience, just with a very narrow audience consciously or unconsciously imagined. It's struck me as odd with the review drive lately especially - that there'd be a need to "review" a tech demo or a RMN birthday/eventgame that explicitly /were/ made with the community audience in mind. The unconsciously-targeting-RM-community ones are weirder though, stuff like building "good" RTP games or "pushing 2k3 to its limits" or something where the restriction that's supposed to make the project interesting necessarily restricts it to other developers. Luckily the close cousin "I'm gonna build this game to totally hype up the screenshot thread" is pretty dead.

One of the biggest changes definitely is that the 20+ hour magnum opus sprawling RM game has become a whole lot more rare. Hard to say why that is but I sure don't mind it.
author=psy_wombats
One of the biggest changes definitely is that the 20+ hour magnum opus sprawling RM game has become a whole lot more rare. Hard to say why that is but I sure don't mind it.


20 hour magnum opus that take 6 years to make still seem to be in vogue over on RPGMakerWeb but your right, they seem to be slowing down over here.

Im not an expert or anything but I have a feeling that its partly because smaller games being made in other engines being quite common now, so why not make shorter games im RM too.

Game jams have also done a lot to sort of retool the way a lot of developers approach their projects and what an RPG can even be.

Lastly I think its a generational thing, a lot of the younger people getting into RM now are growing up playing shorter titles, sure they might go back to the classics from the 90s thanks to videos they see on Youtube and the like, but they arent exposed to 80 hour epics the same way we were when we were young because they just arent being made that much these days, for better or for worse.
I don't know what the de-facto RMN game is really. The most recent trend that came to mind was the RMVX dungeon crawlers that take all of their inspiration from SMT game design. But most of the heavy hitters here have an audience reaching outside of the RMN community and are some variant of a Yume Nikki inspired game or a foreign horror thing that got big on youtube somewhere. There are actually big boi RPGs, but they're kind of on the shallow grindy side that doesn't really appeal to oldbie regulars.

Back in the GW days, GW was the town square for what you were making. It was your engine help, your audience, your idea generator, the free RPGs you played and your social circle packed into one. It's interesting how the main GW site went down the idea of "forum topics being the game-page" got emphasized as this adaptive way to make do without a game database. But it only kind of tightened the imperative of the social dynamic that happened within game topics.

RMN retains a lot of the outdated quirks that "you're just supposed to do, because that's how it ended up being this way." But idk, there's more awareness these days I find. People wonder why the Misaos are still here or what it even is. No one is impressed at a CBS or what you've done with a script that's called programming lol. It'd kind of fractured to the point where I don't know why you're here if there isn't some attachment to prior communities or the way things were.
author=Darken
It'd kind of fractured to the point where I don't know why you're here if there isn't some attachment to prior communities or the way things were.

I think it’s mostly grasping at straws, support for rpgmaker2000/2003 is very limited these day, I’ve frequented rpgmakerweb a few times, and the mods there readily admit they’re not too familiar with rpgmaker2000/2003 because 2000 and 2003 are old engines now. But on RMN, you got people like Gadesx, kaine87, Kazesui and sometimes Cherry and others popping in to provide support.

fdelapena and ghabry of Easyrpg, also sometimes come in to provide advice here. But they're usually easier to reach on easyrpg.org now (I still need to respond to fdelapena about mpeg4 video plackaback...) But even on more recent rpgmaker communities like pixelhorror discord, people there still strongly suggest, for basic technical support RMN, is still the best place to get your questions answered involving 2000/2003, because we still have an older, stronger userbase frequenting the forums.

I don’t know whether this is still true in recent years. But yeah, I was surprised, people are mentioning RMN if you want to get help with rpgmaker2000/2003.
I LOVVEEE YOU ALLLL....I mean all except the tiny tiny handful of you I've made it clear I very specifically hate....i love all you guys, you're allgreat...and some of you i love more than is appropriate....not like in a sexual way you pervert i mean i've just ain't never met you so like how much FEELS are you allowed to feel towards an internet friend, y'know? kentona's like a quirky canadian Uncle. i DO NOT have a shrine to Archeiah_Nessiah in my bedroom or anywhere else in my house! this is how vicious rumors get started.

you know the interesting thing is...i haven't even started drinking yet. REALLY
Was gonna post this in the above mentioned thread, but hopped back to the outdated talk in here since eh, it's me being nostalgic at 3am about a later time!

I am well past the early days, but i came into the RMN scene at a weird transition point that's interesting to me as an extension of this sort of Oral History. i interacted with a lot of early/mid 2000s rpg maker legacy while being on the cusp of some pretty big changes



In particular, it's interesting to me how i had such an anti-marketing stance for awhile, due to how much cool vaporware i saw carefully curated via screenshot and limit-testing tech demos (and indulge in, myself). It's such an ass-backwards approach to think of in Today's Indie Scene, but at the time trying to profit off of something i could only see as a hobby seemed alien.

I barely dipped my toes into RRR and had no idea what people on RMN were talking about when they referenced gw. I only got to RMN in 2011, after a couple years floating between different forums

Like many people, the tribal, isolated nature of individual forums stands out in my memory. I had a friend who, around 2008/9, was big into rm but was my only point of contact with this world. I remember testing his broken games that had this amateur, reverent passion that i unironically enjoy. (see: one of my highest review ratings going to TRINITY/SING, a game i dearly wish i had more of) From my pov at the time, he was doing something magical and amazing and wonderful and impressive...that would have without a doubt been mocked to pieces. (iirc it was his fursonas and complex anime geopolitics a la Xenosaga, as told through 2k3 rtp edits and random midis. I loved it at the time and i'd love it now, albeit for different reasons)

And then in true teenager fashion, i was smug as fuck to him about how superior rpg maker vx OBVIOUSLY was to 2k/2k3 while i made "super cake buffet" (I tried XP, but could never get my pirated version to work)

I'd mostly lurk places like rrr and even rmn for quite some time, while rarely interacting. When i finally started, I became known mostly as a weirdo who made rtp resources on rpg maker vx forums circa 2010 tooo...2014/15ish? I don't consider myself famous or noteworthy, but in my respective puddle i was a moderately-sized fish b/c I provided resources and filled lots of requests. People love free stuff!

At one point i was a mod on 3 separate forums created as the result of various drama on forum #1 (rmvx.net), and joined all sorts of small communities to hunt for scripts/resources i could shove into my game

THAT is the legacy that I feel has come to form a Core Part of rm game identity from XP-onwards: stitched together code that crashed on the regular and bloated games with all sorts of vestigial design anatomy.




sup, lockpicking and lighting system...now done through SCRIPTS!! wow!

I have a fond memory of the first forum i modded for, when one of the admins went down in a blaze of glory to protest changes from The Management, ientry. He made every page play the rap version of bloody tears and we had all sorties of "mods asleep post whatever" parties until he got banned (which OF COURSE I hopped on......while being a mod)



The site has since been deleted but i have half-legible detritus saved

The atmosphere could still be pretty harsh and tbh i'd rate it as a bad influence even though I met LOTS of cool people through My Experiences. irc was known as the place to go only if you were tough enough to stand being called the n-word and mocked for not adhering to the channer-esque channel culture. (which was supported by one of the mods, who was an honest-to-goodness white supremacist. I didn't understand what that meant at the time, despite not being white, and was also coming from 4chan culture)



I'd do things like deface game awards for reasons??? like many channers, I was a depressed asshole lashing out at other people under the pretense of jokes and memes

By the time i'd made it to rpgmaker.web in 2012 i'd cleaned up my act somewhat. I wonder where i'd be at if I'd stuck with it--i eventually quit modding b/c It Sucked and i was tired of staff in-fighting, plus i've never been one to do much with social capital. I don't regret giving it up, but i know some people like archeia have made a career that sprung from involvement in rm stuff. we'd worked together for various things, so would I have ended up in a similar boat if I'd stuck around? who knows!



On the positive end, i can say my involvement in making resources did WONDERS for my art. You can really see the difference! vx/vxace rtp style still lurks in my art to this day (this wip is a strong example). people were IMPRESSED I could mimic the rtp style so well.........even though rtp is really mocked by a lot of folks.



Looking back, one of my favorite things is all the characters from existing series i made. I like to think someone, somewhere, saw my crude attempt at vx rtp cloud or albedo and thought "finally!". As an art form i consider it inferior to the dadaesque collages you'd see in lots of 2k-era games, per previous discussion. I don't know if this was in earlier parlance, but i got my start making frankensprites/frankenportraits of rtp stuff



i think i filled every gay request i caught on the board b/c it was the kind of time where meeting someone else gay BLEW MY MIND



I also made lots of tutorials lost to various forum deletions, though they must survive SOMEWHERE in some fashion, since I semi-recently had someone ask to use materials i made for them in a commercial game. it weirds me out when it happens even though I suppose it's flattering



mmmmm and forum signatures + banners. can we bring those back? please? i could just start using one again and no one could stop me

Anyways, hope this doesn't come across as tooting my horn. It's stuff that stands out in my memory from the POV of someone who primarily made resources. When i came in, rpg maker was still this hobby in a bubble, and when I left things had changed...somewhat. There were more serious commercial ambitions, and it wasn't until like 2016/17 when I moved over to twitter/discord for gamedev talk. That's recent history plenty of people remember!

The projects i have left in rpg maker use mv and gut it so much my dev partner and i will probably make the great Unity leap...depending on how well Unity fares after their Recent Changes. Unsurprisingly, based on the art i've shown here, i still do character portraits and the like, but primarily for visual novels. (I say i moved to twitter for gamedev talk, but as anyone aware of that account knows 99.9% of it is shitposts and retweeting other people's art/games/resources. bet you can guess my discord username, and i have the illustrious id of #6693. even there i'm only active in like, 2 vn/queer dev servers while being a member of 10+)

I like to think i've become obscure again, which suits my lurker nature just fine!

-----

@Penta: Yeah I had no idea you were a resident in other places. I simply saw you as the Demon Slayer dev just tinkering away at this one gam (and lots of kenshiro gif avatars). It's nice to hear personal histories like this since I'm pretty hazy on the RMVX.net and RRR lore, and it must be hard to open up sometimes if you're used to slipping into a lurker personality. Also in general with LBGT+ communities arising out of RPGMaker is interesting to me, since recent VNs of that scene kind of coincide with RM.

There's a bit of a split with the RMXP and up RPGMakers. Obviously it's long enough for even RMVX to feel nostalgic, so I hope I don't give off the impression that this looking back conversation is "rm2k3 only" it's just within my nature and circumstances to gravitate towards the internet archeology that's harder to recover I guess. Who knows in 10+ years RMN might be the new web atlantis that we wish we saved stuff from better. :V
Ha, I'd say my posting here instead of the "main" discussion is more a sign of lurker tendencies than anything else! It's funny how thinking about VX feels recent in my memory, even though it's been over 10 years and i've gone from surviving middle school to seeking a phD.

I think Zephyr Skies is an example of the idea of a game with that "build hype for the screenshot thread" ethos while being quite cheeky. Sure, it was made for a surrealism-themed event, but it captures a lot of what feels very RPG Maker Culture (whatever THAT ultimately means)

For a decent chunk of time in 2016/17 I touched my toes into the more horror-oriented and tumblr-based side of things, Pinkuboa's blog being a great example. That was also interesting, as the yume-nikki type side really does feel like a parallel evolution.

I am JUST DELIGHTED at how much is out there for my gay little trans heart these days! Since I spent a lot of my Teenage Forum Socializing in rm spaces, i can look back at all the ambiguously gendered presentation i had and think "OH". There's been interesting stuff I can't remember offhand about how things like rpg maker/ren'py/twine/other "easy to pick up" type tools are nice and accessible to marginalized creators that are less likely to have the resources for more "build it all yourself" type engines. It's neat to think about as we see more and more and MORE Content from the kind of people i remember being SO SO RARE to see openly out online. (As one example: parts of the rmvx.net culture were rancorous enough that i remember one trans woman who was harassed off the forum. shock and awe some people didn't stick around. at the time i didn't even know what "transgender" was, plus being a caustic asshole """teasing""" was a tolerated social norm so long as you picked the "right" targets.) though much like high school, of the people i still follow i think maybe one is cis/straight.

RM's accessibility in general has let all sorts of neato niche things flourish from all sorts of people, which is one of my favorite things about rpg maker! It can still capture that kind of experimentation that's been lost in more mainstream games due to how EXPENSIVE said games have become to make. (I mean, so can all sorts of indie games, and """indie""" games with lots of resources and sophisticated tools. i just have a soft spot for rpg maker)

The kinds of games i keep trying to make in rpg maker are totally a reason i've since gravitated towards more text-oriented mediums like interactive fiction/visual novels. I still have those self-contained Weird RPGs kicking around my ideas folder, but if i make them idk if it'll be in rpg maker! Maybe Rpg Maker XV++ 2.8 HD Final Mix.

and yeah, it's fascinating to hear this kind of stuff! Despite how fragmented and isolated a lot of places were (still are? I think way less so these days, but i've checked out of basically everywhere so idk), it feels like there's a connected string of common experiences. Which, ok, plenty of places had member overlap, especially when it came to posting/seeking resources. not many people doing that stuck around outside of their "home" forum, if they had one.

And yes, I fully intend to make my 2020 Demon Slayer update, right on schedule.

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hmmm... signatures.

could they be brought back in style? are they retro enough to be chic again?
Signatures are a scourge that should forever be purged.