What to do before you make your RPG

じ☆ve冰风

In this tutorial I'm going to go over things that every game developer should consider and decide on *before* making their dream RPG in RPGMaker. A lot of this is based on my 6 years here on the forums, and what I've learned as a game developer myself.

1. Learn the Engine
This step sadly gets overlooked, and should be the first thing anyone does. Learn how the engine works. Learn what all of the commands do. Learn how to use the engine to do things. I'd recommend finding some tutorials on this, or there is a built in help with F1 in MZ that can help you learn. Or, worst case scenario, make a project and just try every event command and see what happens. That's honestly what I did in 2014, and I got some very silly results due to not understanding the engine (tip: Never put an A1 tile in a B slot or vice versa unless you wanna see weirdness).

2. Plan out your game before starting
Too many people paint themselves into a corner in game making. By that I mean they just rush ahead in the story then realize late that their game is in a bad spot because of things they didn't do right in the beginning. I've even seen AAA companies do this and I've read interviews with the company where they have admitted they got to x spot and didn't have the final bad guy figured out but it was too late to go back to the beginning and lead up to it. You want to avoid doing this to yourself too especially as you have less resources than AAA companies, and speaking from experience, going back to Chapter 1 2 years later to make it better lead up to Chapter 7 is a pain in the (modded by me).

Now don't feel you need to have a 150 page detailed story of the entire game either. But make sure you list out a basic plan so you know where the game is going before starting.

3. Make a short game in the engine first
Too many decide to immediately buy the engine and make Chronofinalpersonatriggeroctopathpokemanquest in it, and then wonder why they failed to make it years later. Instead, make something in the engine start to finish just to get a feel for game development. It can even be a small follow up game to your main project, or a project to just test out a feature. For example, the first game I made was a 20 level dungeon crawler with a *lot* of battles, and I used this to test my intended combat system and see how well it worked. I didn't even put a plot in it except a short blurb at the beginning that said Escape from here. That was it.

Epic bestseller? Probably not. Nor was it intended to be. In fact it never was released to the public in the end and stayed private, but I used it to learn things in the engine.

4. Decide what Engine to make your main game in
This is an important step. There are some engines that cannot make certain games well, and this is the time to decide based on what you learned so far if RPGMaker will work for you and what you want to do. This may involve seeing what you can code or will need to code too as well, and looking into what to do if you need something coded.

5. Decide if your game will be commercial or not NOW
This is important. You should decide before you have even made the game in the engine if you want it to be commercial or not. The reason is it is easier to go from commercial to non-commercial as all commercial resources can be used in non-commercial games. However, if you decide late to go from non-commercial to commercial it is going to be harder as some resources that are free to use non-commercially cannot be legally used at all commercially. So a late change may result in you having to suddenly change a lot of resources you've been using in your game as well.

In my experience, I personally prefer to list all of my games as commercial when I start. The reason is that way I hold myself to a higher standard (people expect more if you sell your game), and I know that once it is done I can change my mind and just release it for free instead if I wish, and all my assets I've used will still be legal to use.

6. Don't plan too many features into your game
This is a biggie. What often dooms indie games is they try to make an RPG with every feature in it they can think of, like crafting, fishing, swimming, monster collecting, farming, card games, dating sim, mini-games, etc etc etc. Remember you are a team of 1! You need to keep it somewhat simple so that you finish your game in under 30 years. Plus, we have a classic saying here you may have seen on Andar's starting point for new users:

A titanic list of features is a great way for your game to go the way of the Titanic.

7. Use placeholders
Too many devs once they start making the game immediately go out and try to get all the music, art, and scripts or plug-ins they need early. This is a big mistake. The reason it is not recommended to do this is we have a saying in battle "All plans tend to change once contact is made with the enemy". For us, that should be "All plans tend to change once we start making our game". You may discover some parts of your plot don't work as you intended. You may learn that stealth section you wanted to make is not fun to do as a player. So you may need to change things, and if you already got all the art and music and such for your game, you may now have art and music that you have no more use for, but you are still legally obligated to pay for it if you have already hired someone to make it.

When I was new here, I heard of someone saying they spent $10,000 all on custom tiles, then changed their game design so drastically that they can't use any of it. Don't let that be you.

Spoiler: Personal Story from the making of The Book of Shadows

Here is my experience with this in The Book of Shadows. The plan for The Book of Shadows involved a 12 chapter plot. If you have played the released game you know it has 9 Chapters. What happened was during dev I felt Chapter 3 added little to the story so I cut all of the Chapter and edited the end of Chapter 2 to transition to Chapter 4. Then when I got near the end I decided that Chapters 10 - 12 were just extra as they involved a twist I was going to do on the final boss of Chapter 9 that would result in you having to do something more to put an end to the evil for good. But I decided it didn't add to the game, so I cut all of Chapters 10 - 12 and had the game end at the end of Chapter 9. So this means in the final product the game was the following original Chapters in order:

Chapters 1 2 4 5 6 7 8 9 9

9 is listed 2x as I cut it into 2 Chapters, so Chapter 8 was part 1 of Chapter 9 and Chapter 9 was part 2 of Chapter 9.

However, since I did realize this in dev, I had already gotten the art and music for those cut sections. Probably lost about $500 in the end due to that, though the music I can at least find a home for in another game.

8. Plan breaks
Too many try to work on their game 12+ hours a day while working full time, and that pace is not substainable for any length of time before your body refuses to do it anymore. Plan into your schedule time off. I find what works for me is to plan on my calendar one day a week where I don't work on RPGMaker, and instead do anything else like read books, watch TV, play a game, run errands, or just go outside.

Hope this helps someone out there as they get ready to make their games in RPGMakerMZ...or any other RPGMaker.


本贴来自国际rpgmaker官方论坛作者:bgillisp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/what-to-do-before-you-make-your-rpg.125851/