THOUGHTS ON USING RTP.

Nah. RTP is totally kicking. If you want to distinguish yourself with it, try making some edits - whether it be recolours or clumping of tiles. Use the tiles to good enough effect and people won't have a reason to be asses about the set you use.

The outdoor parts of the RTP look kind of awful. Consider grabbing the RPG Maker XP RTP and combining it with what you're using. It's a free download from rpgmakerweb. It has cliffs, cave walls, and water that look less like giant cubes.

Ace's RTP is generally totally fine for manmade areas. If your game takes place in modern day or entirely inside a single structure, then I don't foresee any problems with using just the Ace RTP. It works well for that. You can also just minimize the number of outdoor areas and try to design them so that they have very few curved cliffs or shores.

There are probably ways to turn the blocky cube-ness from an ugly-ass limitation into a stylistic thing, though. I've seen it attempted (though I can't remember by whom). I just know that imagining how the map would look if you made it with a better tileset and then trying to get as close to that look as you can with the blocky tileset isn't the way to accomplish that.

I love the RTP, but I also love Dragon Quest, which it is trying to emulate. So, it's prefect for me! Tastes differ! Opinions are happening!

EDIT: I love the RTP when it's used for a game that it is suitable for. It is not a very serious graphic set and should probably not be used for serious games, at least not the character sets. If you're making a DQ clone, it's perfect.

RTP is boring to people like me, and I've been in the community for only a year.
Everytime I see a RTP-generated faceset, I artistically rage. At least Kaduki has style and character and don't freak me out. =3

A game with simple or poor spriting is way more impressive and it's what gets people to look at your game unless you are known for being an awesome designer. I don't usually even take a second glance at rtp games since I am an artist and I place a heavy emphasis on good art. In a sea of rpg games it's what makes you stand out.

author=Crystalgate
Personally, I don't mind the RTP. However, I will mention that the looks of your game is the first thing someone sees.

It's actually, by definition, the only thing someone sees. It's not necessarily the first thing someone experiences, though.

It really depends on which RTP when it comes to my answer to this. For things like 2k/3 RTP, a simple rearrangement of tiles to add a bit of freedom to town/dungeon/worldmap layouts is really all that's needed to bring it up to a more acceptable quality. I will admit, though, that this RTP (when left as is) is awfully limiting and I would discourage anyone from using it if they have no plans of at least making an effort to mix up mainly the town chipset.

I haven't had all that much experience with the XP RTP, but from what I've seen, though the chipsets are more focused on a single style of graphics ("grass" mountain or "stone"), the graphics lend themselves to enough creativity that one could easily get away with using these graphics and still produce a strong game mapping-wise.

I've found VX's RTP to be the most limiting in terms of creating a realistic and free-flowing landscape, mostly because of the "square" factor of everything and the engine's use of auto-tiles, which adds unnecessary workload to creating even the most simple landmarks. This is where I most recommend someone to find other graphics (or at least add-ons) to aid them in making their game, as although the graphics themselves are nice, the limits to use them do more harm than good.

Then again, this mostly applies to the mapping portion of designing a game using RTP. Facesets and charsets of the RTP can of course be used, though you'd typically need to try pretty hard to establish these characters as their own beings (especially those who share their graphics with the default heroes that come packaged with any new projects (such as Ralph)). Of course, if you're not an artist, or know someone who is, you may have to just deal with it.

I work in RM2K and I use the RTP because:
1. I love how it looks. It reminds me very much of those cool old skool RPG's.
2. Why fix something that isn't broken? The RTP works. If I need something custom made, I'll create it myself, otherwise I stick to RTP.
3. It saves time. If I had to create every single chipset, charset and faceset completely from scratch I wouldn't finish my game before dying of old age. RTP FTW!

In the case of the more modern RPG Makers I'll just say I prefer RM2K way over any of the modern RPG Makers when it comes to graphics/RTP. It just loses that classic old skool charm.

Personally as soon as I see RTP of any kind my expectations of the game go down several notches. I can't help it, it just happens. Dunno if it's the lack of effort it shows, or that there are literally hundreds of games looking exactly like the one I'm looking at. It's just so boring.
I can't imagine I'm alone in this.