Basic Guide for Starters! - Part 1 -

じ☆ve冰风

Hi there!

I'm CleanWater, an experienced indie developer and veteran user of RPG Maker 2003.
Some of the image examples below are from my own game project.


This tutorial is aimed to beginners that just started messing with RPG Maker 2003 (aka RM2k3) and have no clue of what to do next.
Here you will learn the basics of this classic and wonderful game engine and the basic gameplay aspects of classic retro RPGs.

Summary

• First Steps and Traditional RPGs Core Concepts
  
• Creating our First Map
  
• Our First Village (Fully Evented)
  

Creating our First Game Project

Before looking at traditional RPGs gameplay core aspects, let's create our first project.
In the upper left menu of the editor click in Projects -> New Project.

You can also create a new project in the blank sheet icon right below this menu.

Set your project folder name, a title to your game project and decide where to save the project folder.

The Core Concept

As the name suggests, this engine is supposed to create classic retro RPGs, just like the ones from old consoles such as SNES and Sega Genesis. This type of game is divided into three screens where the gameplay occurs: World Screen, Menu Screen and Battle Screen.

World Screen

Here is were the major part the gameplay of any RPG occurs. It's here where the player will talk with persons in-game (called NPCs) to get information about the game plot, open chests to earn money and items, open doors to go to different maps, get hints to where to go next, etc.
The World Screen is composed of many maps, each one representing a location of your game (i.e.: villages, inside houses, forests, caves, dungeons, etc).

To create maps for the World Screen of your game, you just need to right-click in the folder with the name of your project in the editor and then click in the New Map.

Each map is composed of three layers: Lower Layer, Upper Layer and Event Layer. We will take a deeper look on them and how to create maps in the next tutorial.

Menu Screen

Here is where the player check their inventory, their character status, equip items, save the game (if allowed), etc. It's accessed in-game by the Esc, X, C, V, B, N, and Num0 keyboard keys.
All the information that appears here is defined in the Database of your game. We will see more about it later in later tutorials.

Battle Screen

Here is where your game characters fight against the monsters of your game. When this screen will appear is also defined by you. The player returns to the World Screen after all monsters die (when their HP reaches 0) and the player wins the battle. If the player dies here (all the game party HP goes to 0) it's Game Over and the player will go back to the Main Screen shortly after.
Your game characters will use their items, skills, etc, that were defined by you in the Database. The monsters the player will fight against and their behavior also are defined by you in the Database. We will see more about it later in the later tutorials.

Conclusion

So, you just learned the basic aspects of traditional RPGs and how the three screens where the gameplay occurs works.
In the next tutorial, we will see how to create our World Screen maps, how to use each layer to give shape to them and general aspects of gameplay while in the World Screen.

See you next time!



本贴来自国际rpgmaker官方论坛作者:CleanWater处,因国际论坛即将永久关站,为了存档多年珍贵资料,署名转载到本论坛存档,由于官方帖子为英文原帖，需要中文翻译请点击论坛顶部切换语言为中文就可以将帖子翻译成中文浏览,方便大家随时查看,原文地址：https://forums.rpgmakerweb.com/threads/basic-guide-for-starters-part-1.82618/