BEING TAKEN SERIOUSLY.

RPG Maker can and has been used to make commercial games, although it's very important to note that you can get in a lot of trouble if you try to go commercial with a 2000 or 2003 project -- they never received an official English release, and the translation is technically illegal to own and use. all the versions released afterward (XP, VX, Ace) are fair game, though (and if you're using 2000 or 2003 noncommercially you shouldn't have any problems -- Enterbrain doesn't really care about them anymore).

can't help you with B! moving on.

there are a lot of resources for people learning to pixel, so you should be in luck there. one my my personal favourites is despain's series of tutorials, which cover tiling sprites in addition to basics like form, lighting, colour, and contrast. they're a very beginner-friendly overview and I dig 'em.

at any rate, good luck! it's good to hear that you're setting out to build a varied skillset -- it's very, very useful in the long run to be at least competent at a wide variety at things. even if you're hiring other people to do your programming or art or whatever down the road, if you have some experience in it yourself it's that much easier to track down problems and communicate effectively with your team members.

If you know any programming language, you can probably pick up Ruby in about fifteen minutes just by pretending like you already know it and editing shit to look like the other shit that's already there. And maybe a little bit of googling what the fuck is going on when it doesn't work. If you know Ruby, "learning" RGSS isn't really a thing - you just figure out how to edit the parts you need to edit by searching for function names and crap. It's mostly pretty sanely organized and documented. If you want to change how evading works, you search for "evad" and "evas" and "miss" and find a bunch of functions related to evasion, then you search again to find what functions call those functions and under what conditions. Then you just start hacking away in what you think is probably valid Ruby code, and it generally tells you when you fucked up.

That was how I learned it anyway. Knew C++ from college courses, and knew PHP from teaching myself PHP while getting paid by the hour for web design, so I started trying to edit an RMXP script I'd downloaded to work slightly differently. Cuntpasted some shit and edited it in a way that I thought would work. My first attempt errored, but I was pleasantly surprised that the scripts opened right to the line that errored. I tried to fix it, and fifteen minutes of messing with it later I figured out that you can't capitalize variable names. Another five minutes later I realize that you can only put line breaks in the middle of lines if the line break causes the first half to not make sense on its own any more. Then my edit still doesn't quite work right, but it doesn't error any more, it's just not functionally correct. And I am happy because I learned shit, and I didn't really need to do that edit anyway. After doing this several other times with different scripts, my edits started sometimes working. And then they started working more often. And then they started working better. And then I started fixing bugs in other people's scripts.

I completely disagree.

Read the book ReWork. The underlying problem of "professionalism" is that resources are wasted on image, rather than substance.

For example, the image of a large company. You're actively wasting money on staffing, office space, and heating/cooling all for the appearance of a big company when you can't actually afford it (look at Walmart, and ask how much the employees are paid). Find the right size for your organization and stay with it. The costs will be manageable, and you can pay people better.

You wanna be taken seriously? Do the serious work to make things work in terms of fun and replayability, and adapt it according to your sensibilities. Be "take-home" good, instead of "store" good (you don't want a product that is flashy but fails when testing at home, instead have a product that may or may not look like much but when people test it, they are so impressed they tell their friends about it). The problem with a polished image is that everything on the shelf will try to emulate this, except for that one game that has an odd look to it, say like Okami with its ink-painted deal. That's the actual one that will catch your eye enough to pull it off the shelf. That and the one that is so professional looking it stands out from the others.

Finally, don't try to pander. The loudest voices are often the minority and are short-termers, but if you have a truly good product, you will have people who continue to be interested. Not to say you should ignore criticism, but if it's important, people will repeat it.

I think the biggest problem of going commercial with RPG Maker and being taken serious is that if you look at screenshots and can actually see it was done with RPG Maker it's a HUGE turn off for most people outside RPG Maker communities.

So if you want to be taken seriously you need to at least do your own art completely and probably also use some programming to code your own battle system rather than using one of the standard ones.

And the UI is also very important. It shouldn't look "clicked together" and the font needs to be nice and fitting to the game.

author=bugbar
As ryareisender said, looking like an RPG maker game is the worst thing you can do commercially. It's sad but true: there's a massive elitism with programming languages and engines. For example, Hotline Miami was made in game maker and when some people realised, suddenly all cactus's work was seen as less impressive. I guess people don't realise, just because you use an engine, doesn't mean it makes the game for you? It's pretty ridiculous.

Agreed.

I mean, no one looks down on XCOM Enemy unknown because it was made in Unreal. No one looks down on GoD Factory Because it was made in Unity (also because only maybe 10 people know what the hell GoD Factory is).

So why do people look down on games made in RPGmaker or Game Maker or whatever? As long as the game is GOOD, it shouldn't matter what it's made in!

Hell, I saw people whining about how Gunpoint was made in GameMaker and how that means selling it for any kind of money was wrong because it was "just a game maker game". Totally ignoring how the game was incredibly well crafted and fun. -_-

There's a book called "LevelUp! The Guide To Great Video Game Design", written by one of the designers of God of War, Drawn to Life, and Darksiders. It covers the process from the sudden idea for a game to the sales pitch and marketing, and you get tips on what to do and not to do to make a game appealing to people, even if it's the same damn thing as another game (Example: Final Fantasy and Call of Duty). It's nearly 500 pages long and includes a chili recipe. If you really want to go commercial, it's a good guide if you buy it through Amazon or somebody who sells it for less than retail price.

But in the whole RPG Maker games not being "good enough" thing, the problem is that too many people who didn't customize the engine whatsoever tried to sell their games, and people are now convinced that any game made with it is either a scam or an amateur game. If you can make it look like it was made in XNA or something, and don't say "Made with RPG Maker!", then you should be okay. Look at games like Breath of Death VII or Cthulhu Saves the World. They were made in XNA but could have been done exactly the same in RPG Maker, but then people wouldn't consider them indie masterpieces.