SILVIERA'S PROFILE

XP is my preferred maker. I hear that VX has improved scripting capabilities, but thus far I haven't found anything that couldn't be done in XP.

I'm not sure why everyone is in love with rm2k3 battle system. It tends to be far slower paced than even its predecessor and you pretty much have to work around rather than with the default damage equations in order to make something that is balanced fairly well. I've also seen countless promising projects destroyed by a limited understanding of how broken the Agility stat is compared to everything else.

Since I can jump into XP and manually edit the default battle system (allow skills to crit, make Guarding actually worth doing, etc.), it wins hands down for me. Not to mention scripting allows for a few amazing minigames.

I guess I'm too young to understand that, especially since I grew up in an age where keeping in contact with friends has become ridiculously easy.

Really reading blogs will never be anything more than skimming the surface of what he was actually thinking. The part I don't get is why he insisted on taking out his frustration on a random group of strangers rather than quietly withdrawing from the world. Not that I condone the latter option, but at the very least it would be more understandable.

Then again he might have just done this for attention. After all, most of his blog seems to be pointing people towards what lead him to that point. Not sure what the point of that is after you're already dead, especially since he seemed to be convinced he was on his way to heaven no matter what he did.

The more I type the more confused I become about the whole thing.

You start the game with three skills and every time you level up you gain an ability point, which you can use to learn a new skill or upgrade an existing one.

The main character easily has the biggest skill list and that's the one you're looking at, so hopefully things progress slowly enough that the player's brain doesn't explode.

It's something every game maker suffers from.

For me the best cure for that is to play someone else's game. You may end up getting an idea or two, or be inspired to work on your own project.

In the game editor you'll notice a Materials button. Simply find the appropriate section for the graphics you have drawn and use the Import button to bring it into your game. For most things you'll be prompted to select a transparent color, which will be invisible in your game for that particular graphic. For example if you drew a sprite against a white background, you'd select that background so it would not show up in game.

For more details, push F1 while XP is open to bring up the Help menu. Go under the category RPG Maker XP and click on Material Specifications. This will tell you how large your graphics need to be in order to fit properly and explains a few other things you'll need to know about importing them.

As for the actual drawing part, I recommend using a free program such as Gimp or Graphicsgale. Make sure to save all your graphics as either a JPEG or PNG file.