Why You Should Learn RPG Maker

Today I explain and share my thoughts on the RPG Maker series of game engines.

Places I can be found on the internet:

Music:
Let’s get together now! – OMORI
Three bar logos – OMORI
Finding Shapes in the Clouds – OMORI
Boy oh boy – LISA the painful
Peper Steak – OFF
By your side – OMORI
Tussle Among Trees – OMORI

Useful things that can helps with coding in RPG maker:

Further clarifications:
RPG Maker MV and MZ is coded in Javascript, but every version before that was coded with Ruby and used the Ruby Game Scripting System (RGSS). I didn’t mention that because you don’t really need to *learn* these languages to code with RPG Maker. As long as you’re familiar with any coding language, you’ll be fine. Also Javascript is mostly used for webpages, but the javascript you’ll use on a website and the Javascript you’ll use on RPG Maker are completely different things, so “learning” Javascript wouldn’t really do you any good.

Why this video took so long to make (if you care):
So I started this video by completely redrawing all of the animations of my can character in higher quality, I did this so that I would be able to make him big without losing quality, and also did something that allowed me to make it animated with a transparent background at the same time, which was very tedious to do with the method I used before.

Then I also changed the way I recorded audio midway through, and you can hear at 2:47 the massive difference in echo.

Then there is also the fact that this has so far been the hardest script to write by far. I knew what I wanted to say but structuring it was really complicated and many parts got rewritten or removed, and changes got made up until the very end.

[BinzuDev]

Hello, thanks for watching to the end!
If you’re new here, welcome! I have many more gamedev videos planned for the future,
And if you’ve been waiting for this video, thank you for your patience! This has been the hardest video to make so far for all kinds of different reasons.
There’s a section in the description for additional things I didn’t have time to talk about in the video and why this video took so long to make.

[vaennyx]

this video perfectly describes why i love this engine; its like modding the shittiest game ever created and using different workarounds to do something amazing

[danterizzi]

There's a RPGM free alternative called "RPG Paper Maker". It's very good if you want to create 2.5d style RPG games.

[micahlindley]

There should be something like this for 3d games. Like Trenchbroom for Quake, but as a game engine with simple modeling tools.

[b.heaven]

I just started my RM journey. I'm a programmer by trade so I am a bit confident I can navigate through the codebase. Just last night I started practicing coding in MZ with the purpose of displaying text and drawing rectangles. A simple playing around the title screen is a good way to acclimate with MZ's code.

From this simple exercise, I few minor peeves already emerged. Most notably, the game lacks substantial documentation on what things are and what they do. Despite initial confidence I could still use a good API and object docs to help navigate. Stuff like what is a Scene, where do I pull this and that data, how do I make things happen when I press something, etc. Community docs help a lot, though they are either super basic stuff (What is JavaScript?) or too advanced for what I need.

[YoshimiMilk]

I love how you mentioned the pros and the cons of RPG Maker unlike others who only highlight the positives.

[HyperNova]

I bought the "Trinity" version of MV for PS4 when it was first announced, but had to wait several years before it was released due to all kinds of delays and quality issues that they wouldn't bother explaining to us... I had a blast with it when it finally arrived, but around the same time I had also got my hands on Dreams for PS4, and that was the point where I finally thought to myself, "I think I can actually do this, with enough time and effort I could make my own AAA game and quit my crappy factory job." Of course, both of those PS4 games lack any way of selling or monetizing your creations, so they're basically dead-end routes for anything other than showing something off to your friends... But it was the first time I had ever felt like being a solo game dev with absolutely zero coding knowledge was actually possible. I spent several more years after that just collecting and organizing assets to use in MZ, and that's perhaps the greatest strength the engine has: There are an insane number of options out there for free music and graphics that you can Frankenstein together into something that's pretty darn appealing, and if you're an awesome storyteller then there's nothing stopping you from creating a cinematic masterpiece that would make Hollywood jealous (and why hasn't there been a movie based on TO THE MOON yet?). But the amount of work required to get to that point is... Well, for anyone who has never made a game before, it's infinitely more work than you can imagine, lol. No matter how talented you think you are, it's gonna eat up an enormous chunk of your life... So you better be darn sure that's what you wanna do before you go selling the farm. I've been unemployed for a year-and-a-half now and my game hasn't come along very far at all -- but what I do have so far, looks better than anything I thought was possible with an RPG MAKER game. The bad reputation that the engine has isn't because the engine sucks -- it's because beginning developers take on too much and then give up but still try to sell an incomplete, crappy project.

[CalvinArt]

ngl binzu dev is probably one of the best YouTubers out there

[sentencedto]

Really loving the format and editing of these past few videos! Looking forward to more.

[Noizzed]

It's only a problem to make games with the default assets if you are gonna create the visuals straight from the game editor. I recommend using programs like Gimp or Photoshop to create your visuals there, using the default assets you can make parallaxes, basically using layers of many effects like shadows and lighting to build over the default assets.

[suyahatesntr]

I quit RM before I could even produce a single game. Yeah it's easy but the amount of problems you have to face when creating something that doesn't exist is just overwhelming. It's easier to start from zero and create your own game from the ground up than have this game engine lay it out for you.

[mattwcook]

Finally working on fulfilling my life long dream of making my own games! Been working on a project since last July, and have been making great progress! Not only that, but I've been finding all kinds of Plugins that aren't good for this game, but will allow me to make future games that will all play and feel very different than the first one I'm making... very exciting stuff!

[kruko]

This was my first engine. When I was still at school I saw RPG Maker MV at a decent price on steam and tried it. Now I have 500 hours registered at steam. After that I tried construct 2 due to a gamedev course for teenagers where I live and now I study gamedev as a career mainly using unity. However RPG Maker will always have a special place in my life as it's what got me into gamedev

[colbyboucher]

1:05 A trainwreck I don't know about? Time for me to do some digging!

[KuraiNoOni]

@BinzuDev You did forget the newest entry RPG Maker Unite, which was released last year around April/May( after some long delays), so it was available by the time you released your Video. It is currently available in the Unity Market Place, and is set to be released on the Epic Games Store soon.( Steam didn't allow for RMU to use the unity engine as a dependency, which requires a separate license, hence it's delays in the first place). It is also the first installment of the Series, to not be an entire engine, but a Framework built on top of the Unity Engine.( Which harmed its adoption when Unity got screwed by it's now former CEO)

The thing that you could have highlighted, is the Character Generator of newer engines, starting with VX( I believe it was in VX Ace), allowing you to easily create new assets on the fly, which even include the Side View assets, if you want to use the Final Fantasy Style battle system.

The RPG Maker was really popular back in the '00s in Germany with some old classics like "Vampires Dawn" or "Unterwegs in Düsterburg". They were all made in the infamous Don Miguel translation of the RPG Maker 2000 and 2003.( Infamous because it redistributed the entire engine for free aka piracy, as well as changing and adding to the provided assets, like the Inn melody, which was lifted from FF7)

Other popular stuff made in RPG Maker includes Pokemon Essentials, which was used for fangames like Pokemon Uranium.

[LegendaryHeroponRiki]

i really love rpgmaker horror games they are severely underrated

[vargsieber]

Interesting, as a kid i wrote some weird short fantasy stories that i could maybe put into game form with this.

[Noizzed]

As someone who knows how to use more advanced engines like Unity, Unreal and Godot, sometimes i get the itch to just open RPG Maker and make a quick RPG without worrying about most complicated stuff of game dev.

[whyamidoingthis]

So well done, even if it doesnt get too much views, its incredibly well made, be proud

[crownofartorias]

I think the thing that turned me away form the engine and made me drop whatever project I was on was when I wanted to implement combat, but whenever I went to ask questions everyone just said to just start learning code on a different engine at that point :/