DARKEN'S PROFILE

good luck! my posted projects are game maker and they tolerate me

So Sgt M posted a tweet that went viral. Where he made the case for buying an rm2k3 game on sale.

https://twitter.com/SgtM_Yuusha/status/1694160108559704314

It also seems to be a trend? and a "using rm2k3 in 2023" overview video made by riggy that did well views wise. Whenever a sale happens a lot of people are willing to spread the good word of an outdated but cheap alternative to the modern RPG Makers. And in the 2010s onwards it did feel like there was a resurgence with the likes of OFF and space funeral and bleep's games in the Tumblr sphere and probably a lot of Yume Nikki fangames I don't know about.

I'm wondering about everyone's outlook on this. As someone who has moved on from RM, I do think some things hold rm2k3 back a bit. Importing indexed images has a bit of a learning curve. The battle system is just borked if you don't go in knowing the problems. If you want to do anything outside of the engine's bounds you have to turn to these weird patches by some german guy. I figured this shit out 20 years ago, but from an outside view it's like the Smash Bros Melee of game engines. Where the power of nostalgia keeps it alive, but also there's weird hoops for no good reason other than it came from a different time.

We can talk about the merits of engines all we want. It'd be really cool to encourage another renaissance where there's not crazy expectations for a magnum opus RPG, but more just story oriented pixel art games made by people who don't take it too seriously. Thoughts, opinions?

is RMN not enough? what RPG Maker Web can do we can do better

author=Vaccaria

author=Darken
you should probably look up survivorship bias, i wish it was that simple

It was simple. The problem was just not accepting the factors that made those games popular.

maybe i don't understand what you're getting at but there are tons of rpgmaker horrorish games with an artstyle, omori and LISA are the only ones that are actually successful. which is a pretty big anomaly.

Yeah idk if it's just a matter of tutorial/general UX, but it's also important to actually relay that stuff in the marketing/vibe not to just make your game enticing but to let players know "what they are signing up for" so that it's less enticing to people who were never going to play the game in the first place. Though I find that some people don't look at the description/features/trailer/screenshots and will still refund because of it, but thems the breaks.

No one really told me before playing that Chrono Cross was an RPG with 50 characters and part of the design is going out of your way to find and try them out in a quantity over quality way. I think that really impacted the love it or hate it formula rather than not being handholdy enough (or that it's just not chrono trigger). The mindset the player has going into can be really important and affects the onboarding process, expectations, motivation and even competence so much. I feel like appreciating a series like the SaGa games isn't just a matter of better tutorials/hints but going into it knowing what the games actually are. Which is a classic case for any FF fan jumping over to the weirder niche squaresoft titles.

If a single player gets roadblocked at some point in the game, it could just be an anomaly and not something to automatically address unless its like 50% of your playtests or something crazy, and even then it might just not be the right audience. I would also not try to assume ahead of time that players might miss x or y until playtesting because sometimes people end up more observant than you think. For various reasons I generally think it's better to react than to overcorrect, the only con being that it can cost more dev time and iteration.